


Daphne and Elderflowers

by Eristastic



Series: Under(fairy)tales [6]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Acceptance, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Blindness, Other, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-27 08:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6277504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eristastic/pseuds/Eristastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know that there's only one way to redeem yourself after all your mistakes, and that way is definitely not letting yourself be dragged across the country by a stranger who thinks he can help you break your curse.</p><p>But here you are anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Curses

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: suicide idealisation (prominent), some slight body horror (debatable), and Chara's made unnaturally blind 
> 
> I know I've been doing adaptations of actual fairy tales up until now, but...oh well...I'll just write my own...
> 
> 'Cover page' can be found [here](http://eristastic.tumblr.com/post/144264689052/second-set-of-cover-pages-for-my-fics-roses-and).

The first thing you realise is that everything is dark. ‘ _No shit,_ ’ you think to yourself, and try to open your eyes.

The second thing you realise is that something is very, very wrong.

For a start, as your hazy memories stir back into life, you understand that this should not be happening. You should not be alive, but here you are – pulse throbbing, air hissing through your teeth, thoughts swirling through your mind – going against everything you’d wanted. The urge to punch the ground shudders through your muscles and you slam your fist into the flower bed beneath you, grinding scraped knuckles into the cool dampness of the earth. It’s all coming back to you now, because heaven forbid you be allowed any degree of peace in this godforsaken life: the wretched escape here, at the end of your strength; your collapse in the garden of buttercups; that one thought holding you up, forcing your arm as you reached for the nearest flowers, pollen staining your hands.

The voice, just before you were knocked out: ‘ _You miserable excuse for a child, stealing from a witch’s garden_.’

So you were cursed. You can’t even kill yourself right.

Carefully, you lever yourself to sit up, and you hold your hand up tentatively to your eyes. Your fingers meet silky softness giving way like paper. A few more touches and you think you understand: a circlet of flowers (golden, probably, because witches like nothing better than a good dose of irony) around your head, stopping just over your hairline and just above your nose.

You can’t see.

With all the calm of a rabid dog, you try to rip the stalks away but they don’t budge. You pull harder and harder, digging your fingernails into your palms, but while you can tear off as many petals as you like, new flowers stubbornly bloom into life under your hands, and the harder you pull at the stalks themselves, the worse the ache in your head gets.

Well, that’s just fine, you figure. Seeing as you were in for a horrifically painful end _anyway_. You start to pull harder, straining against the stalks that are like rope in your hands, chafing you, and you swear you almost feel something give when you hear a voice.

“Oh my gosh…”

You whirl around, but of course you see nothing so you’re left sitting on your knees in a muddy flowerbed, your hands covered in yellow petals and scrapes.

“Are you alright?” The stranger sounds frantic. He also sounds like he’s coming closer and you instinctively back away until you hear him stop a few paces from you. There’s no sound – though there _is_ , if you pay attention: the wind through the trees and the sounds of birds and insects and rustling leaves – and you begin to wonder where the witch went. If they’re even around. Maybe they just cursed you and left you: wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, although the cursing this time round is a tad literal for your tastes.

“Are you hurt?” the man tries again, and you think you can hear the shifting of fabric as he reaches towards you. You back further away, raising an arm in front of you protectively, like you’re in any position to protect yourself right now.

“Um, it’s okay!” he says. “I’ve stopped, I’m not coming closer. I just want to help. Can you understand me?”

You nod, your mouth dry and your tongue heavy, warning you not to speak. Just wait until he’s gone, then you can swear and shout as much as you like. But for now, you keep your lips shut tight, your head bowed, your legs curled up ready to run. Wait until he leaves.

“I’m, um, I’m Asriel.” He’s still talking, very much not leaving. “I want to help, if you need it. Can you…can you see?”

Your heartrate thunders at his question because you can’t ignore it without him getting angry. So you shake your head.

“Okay. Is that…natural?”

You shake your head.

“Alright.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to touch you if you don’t want me to. If you’d like, I’d be happy to take you back to my home and see if we can help you with those cuts, and maybe your, um, your flowers. My mum’s really good at healing, so I’m sure she’ll be able to do something. Will you let me help?”

It’s funny, if you’d let yourself laugh. He thinks he can help, when the only thing you want from him is for him to leave you alone so you can finish what you started. You’re not under any illusions that you’re worth more than that. But there are flickers of hope burning in his voice, and you can already feel the adrenaline draining from you, exhaustion sloshing back to take its place.

That shouldn’t matter. Dying doesn’t take much energy.

You’re about to shake your head, tell him to leave you alone, but apparently he’s as impatient as a child because he speaks first.

“Um, I’m sorry, but can I have your hand? It’s bleeding quite a lot: I can bandage it for you.”

There’s no point, but explaining why would take more effort than holding your hand out, so it’s the latter option that you go for.

You freeze when his hand touches yours.

“O-oh gosh!” he jerks back. “I’m really sorry, I should have said! I’m so, so sorry!”

He’s not human. Soft fur, leathery pads, the cool slide of claws against your skin – that’s not human. Amidst his gushed apologies – before you can think better of it and remember what you have to do – you hold your hand out again.

“I don’t care,” you say, your voice grating against your dry, raw throat.

You think he might be smiling when he takes your hand back and starts to peel the sticky petals off it. He seems that sort of type.

 

The walk back to his house is slow: he wisely doesn’t offer to carry you and instead just insists on holding your hand and leading you at a snail’s pace through the woods. That works for you: you’re ready to collapse and if his unnecessarily careful manner means you don’t have to say that, then it’s all good for you. As good as this could possibly be, of course, which isn’t exactly _good_. ‘Not disastrous’, perhaps.

The itch to run back is distracting: the need to go back and shove all the fucking flowers you can find down into your stomach, and it feels so strange that you’re not acting on it. That you’re not being encouraged to act on it. You feel like you’re lost at sea, buffeted around by the prospect of actually having a future. Isn’t that hilarious? Who’d have thought you’d ever have one of those? Trust you to fuck everything up, right to the end.

You know you’re being a coward. You know that, but Asriel’s hand and your curiosity are still enough to keep you moving away from what should have been your grave. And maybe it’s melodramatic to think like that, but you decide to allow yourself that much. Just this once.

Eventually the scattered sounds of the forest peel away, leaving you with erratic rustling noises, gradually growing louder with soft padding that sounds much like Asriel’s footsteps beside you. That and the sudden breeze that picks up around you (laced with the smell of cooking, forcing your empty stomach into armed protest) keys you into where you must have arrived.

Asriel stops you gently, not letting your hand go as the creak of metal (a gate, your mind provides helpfully) scratches its way into your ears. He leads you through the gate and you misjudge it a little, bumping against what feels like moss-covered stone, but Asriel immediately pulls you back onto the right path again. There’s stone under your thin shoes now.

“Welcome back,” says a deep, gruff voice that shakes through your bones. You force yourself to stay still: you _knew_ there were going to be other people. You can’t go being an idiot and getting panicked about this now, can you? It’s your own stupid curiosity’s fault you’re even here.

“Hi Dad,” Asriel calls sheepishly. “Um, I brought back…uh, this is…”

You think he might be gesturing to you, but you don’t take the hint until he squeezes your hand.

Like a mechanical doll, you say, “Greetings, I am Chara.”

There’s a pause, giving you the time to sink into nerves and anxiety that grapples at your lungs. If you could see their expressions, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Or maybe you’re just making excuses for yourself.

When the man ( _monster_ , you correct yourself, because it makes all the difference) speaks, there’s a smile in his voice. “A pleasure to meet you, Chara. I am Asriel’s father, Asgore. I hope you will stay a while?”

Gentle words soothe your spiking nerves and you let yourself be led inside the house. You wonder how many questioning, worried (or angry) glances they’re sending back and forth without you knowing.

Inside the house, warmth and the smell of baking waft over you, and you can barely register the change from stone to smooth wood before you’re guided to a chair. You sit: it’s about all you’re good for at this point.

Asriel lets go of your hand and leaves, the floorboards creaking under him, and you hear the groans of a door opening and closing; muffled voices you can just make out behind it. Asgore sits across from you and you can hear him breathing, can almost feel his warmth across the table.

“Can I see your hands?” he asks softly.

Everyone seems so concerned about your hands, you wonder what they’d think of your throat if they could see it. It aches: a constant reminder of the few petals you’d managed to shove down there before the witch ruined everything. Obediently, you put your hands on the table palm-up. The varnish on the wood feels good against your skin, all red and hot from the blood rushing there.

Fur brushes across the makeshift bandages Asriel had managed to fix in place – checking them, you suppose – and Asgore hums. Not quite pleased. You almost flinch.

“Might I ask how you got these scrapes?”

His voice is like a heat haze in the already warm house: it engulfs you and leaves you struggling for breath, but in a good way, somehow. You’re not quite sure how there _can_ be a good way of doing that, but he manages it. You’ve never heard a voice like his, at least, and that alone is enough to make you want to try and relax (you can’t, but the effort is there).

But there’s nothing you can answer that won’t potentially make him angry, so you shrug.

“I understand,” he says, probably in lieu of a nod. “I do not mean to pry, but could you perhaps tell me about those flowers instead?”

You have to admit to your own failure now? What a joke. You can feel a manic smile tug at the corners of your lips and you hastily bring them back down, locking them in place. “I was cursed,” you say simply, managing not to cringe at the sound of your voice raking through the house’s air like rusty nails through cotton.

“Cursed?” It’s Asriel’s voice now, deep but nowhere near as deep as his father’s, nowhere near as heady or rumbling.

“Oh, my dear,” says a woman’s voice, “was it the forest witch’s doing?”

You shrug because you honestly don’t know.

There are creaks and shudders in the beams of the house around you and the woman’s voice is closer as she says, “May I see your eyes?”

The voices are closing in on you; the warmth is eating you up and boiling you alive, but although you feel like you’re drowning in tasteless syrup, you nod. Tentative hands brush over the flowers, down the lengths of the stalks, and you can _feel_ it. Like it was your own skin. You shiver without meaning to and the hands are immediately taken away.

“I fear I cannot do anything for this,” she says. “If it truly is a curse, and I see no reason why it should not be, then only magic can undo it. I can treat your cuts, and gladly, but I cannot destroy these flowers.”

You nod because it seems like that would make her happy. It doesn’t really matter anyway, you think: they might keep you a night, and then you can go back to the flowerbed and finish the job. Or find another way: it doesn’t really matter to you, you just want to break out from this limbo of hollow smiles and lies through omission. You were already a failure, a fuck-up, a completely useless child through all eighteen miserable years of your life, and it’s honestly just insulting that you’re not even allowed to go out with some dignity.

So you smile for them as they treat your wounds. You smile as Asriel speaks to you, his voice mingling and fading into fuzzy background noise. You smile as they feed you, as hot food rubs down your raw throat and brings bile to your mouth. You smile and smile and smile, so you’re caught unaware when Asriel announces his plan.

“If only magic can undo the curse, I can go with you to look for witches to help,” he says after dinner as you’re both curled up in front of the fire, two hands’ breadths between you.

You look at him sharply, though all that comes of it is a cricked neck and a petal falling on your nose when it breaks away from its head. Asriel laughs lightly and you brush the petal away before he can do something stupid like take it off for you.

“You don’t need to,” you say hoarsely.

“Do you think you’ll be alright by yourself?”

It takes a second to remember that he still thinks you’ve got the same ideas in mind as he does. You don’t particularly want to ruin his ideals for him, so you don’t answer.

“Because I really don’t mind,” he goes on, a pleased tone ringing in his voice. “I’ve got the time, and I’d…I’d like to do it, I think. If you’d be okay with having me tag along.”

The fire crackles and you bring your legs closer to your chest (wearing new, much-too-big clothes, wrapped in someone else’s scent). You suppose that in his eyes, you really are useless. If you refuse, he’s not going to understand what you plan to do: he won’t understand anything beyond ‘they don’t want me’.

And you don’t exactly want that. You’re not an ingrate, no matter what anyone’s told you. You’re _not_. But you also have your pride, and you know that there’s only one way you can redeem yourself after all your mistakes (you believed it when you were taught that, because it makes sense). Asriel’s in the way of it, of the atonement you need so badly that you think it’s going to sear you from the inside.

And Asriel, not knowing any of that, moves his hand to rest against yours, making as much noise as physically possible against the rug to warn you. His little finger rubs yours. You fancy it seems hopeful.

“I’d be okay with that,” you find yourself saying before you can think better of it.

And if his whoop of joy doesn’t make the crushing disappointment in yourself any less painful, it does keep the shame from smarting too much.


	2. The Witch of Heart and Bone

“Oh, watch it!” Asriel tugs on your arm hard enough to pull you into his side and you stumble. “Sorry, you were about to step into a ditch. Sorry.”

He lets you pull away again to collect what’s left of your dignity, such as it is. There’s not much left after days of relying on him for everything you used to hoard selfishly to yourself, things you never let anyone else help with because ‘help’ usually meant ‘ruin’. So you bite your lip and you don’t say anything.

At least he’s chatty. Or rather, at least he doesn’t expect you to chat back. You could do without his constant noise, if you’re honest, but he’s not forever asking you questions. He stopped after the first few stretched-out silences.

You feel the hit of stone against your boot (borrowed, because when have you ever owned anything so well-made?) just too late to do anything about it, and Asriel has to hold you up by your arm again, apologising over and over for not warning you. You shrug as if it doesn’t matter.

“Are you…are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?” he asks, referencing the absurd offer he’d made you the first night.

If there’s one thing you truly miss about having uncovered eyes, it’s glaring. You hope he can hear the glare dripping off your voice instead. “I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he says, and it surprises you to hear how patronising it sounds. Like he’s just indulging your silly whims and fancies.

This trip was a mistake.

You want so badly to pick at the bandages on your hands. It’s foreign enough that the bandages are clean: you’re used to bandages wrapped and stretched over seasons, forced to last. You’re not used to bandages that get changed every night by someone else’s careful hands. Or perhaps you’re just not used to other people touching you. It’s easier with fur and smooth pads than it would be with skin, but you hate it. To some extent, you wish he’d let go so you could go fall in a ditch and die somewhere.

Sometimes, you wonder why he hasn’t yet. You’re not exactly sunshine and flowers to him.

Other times, you wonder why you haven’t slipped away to spare him the trouble.

And you can list up as many excuses as you like, but when it comes down to it, you were just weak, weren’t you? Too taken by his warmth and the sound of his smile and the fear that you’d crush all his stupid idealism, and now you’re here. Now you have to pay for it.

That it’s your fault isn’t going to stop you from grumbling.

“We’ve been walking for three days,” you say measuredly after a few minutes, back to monotonous trudging with his arms wrapped around yours tight enough to cut off circulation. “ _When_ are we going to get to the first witch?”

“Oh. Um, sometime this afternoon, probably?”

You don’t like the uncertainty in his voice, but that’s not the main issue here. “And you just thought it’d be fun to not tell me that? Perhaps give me an idea of what’s going on?”

He laughs nervously – a laugh you’re rapidly growing to hate. “Sorry, I just…I guess I didn’t think.”

“Evidently.”

“Well, we’ll be there soon, don’t worry! I’ll make sure we don’t get lost, so you can just leave it all to me! Oh, watch your left foot there.”

You don’t need to: he pulls you into his side to avoid the unseen horrors you might have stepped into. Fuck if you know. Fuck if you know anything that’s going on: you can’t gauge anything from the rhythmic crush of something that sounds like grass but might as well not be under your feet. You’ve never been brilliant at telling smells apart and you sure as hell can’t smell anything special here: there’s fresh air, if that’s a smell. Occasionally wood smoke. Occasionally cows. It’s not exactly riveting.

So all you have is his arm and his body next to yours: he wouldn’t even let you wear a pack to separate the work a little, he said he couldn’t possibly let you carry it when he’s so much bigger. You wonder how emaciated you look to him. It’s been a while since you last saw yourself in a mirror anyway, even before the flowers. Your hair’s definitely grown longer since, but you can’t really tell for anything else. You just didn’t pay attention, because it didn’t matter.

Now completely sour, your thoughts just a thick buzz of words and bitterness that actually seems worse in the darkness than when you could see, you’re about ready to try calling the whole thing off. You’re not ungrateful, but there are limits. You don’t have anything of value to offer him except release from your company (if that can be considered valuable rather than just desirable), but you figure it doesn’t matter. You can’t take much more of this. And if the witch does undo your curse, so what? He’ll leave, you’ll finish what you started.

Might as well save both of you from another half-day of this torture.

You’re just opening your mouth to say as much when he starts speaking. “We’re going to be going through a monster village for this witch: is that okay?”

“I don’t care,” you say, irritated.

“That’s good.” You can hear the smile in his voice. “I don’t…I can’t promise you’ll like him, this one. I’ve met him once or twice, when I was younger, and I think he’s a good person, but he’s not very…quiet.”

Well, that’s just fantastic, isn’t it? As if he wasn’t babying you enough already, now he’s acting like he knows the type of people you like. Foolish: as if anyone sticks around you long enough to start liking them.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Just so you’re aware.” You hear the crunch and rustle of him shifting his pack, and then his arm grows a little looser on yours. Less like it’s constricting the blood out of your hand. “I’ve got to be honest,” he says, “I don’t really know any of the people we’re going to see. Mum deals with witches every so often because of her healing and all, so she just gave me a list of them. Oh, don’t worry: I know where I’m _going_ , I just don’t know the people. But…I don’t know. It’s kind of fun, for me, to be leaving the house like this. To go meet new people. To not be stuck in the forest all the time. Do you know how boring trees get when you see them every day of your life?”

Shaking your head to show willing, listening to him chatter on like the droning of wasps in your ears, you calm down. The wisps of rebellion are blown away as the moment passes. There’s rage inside you (there always is) but you can control it, you can keep it locked away tightly and you can appreciate that at least this makes it easier. He’s getting something out of it too. It’s not just an unwanted gift to you that you’ll throw away the second his back is turned.

Because of that, you decide you might as well wait it out a day or two more. You might well be impatient to get rid of this guilt itching at you because of your inexcusable cowardice, but you’re not so impatient that you’ll take this away from him, if it’s that important. And there’s light in his voice – the beginnings of laughter and excitement as he delights in a world you can’t see – so obviously it is.

You resign yourself and hope that’ll be enough.

 

When you finally come to the village (your body aching so much that you’re almost glad Asriel won’t let go of your arm), the sounds and smells and sense of _people_ freeze you into stumbling. There’s whispering all around you, in as many pitches as you could imagine, and it’s like mites are biting at your ears, forcing their way in and you can’t shut them out. Wisely, Asriel says nothing – but perhaps that’s just the fatigue, or him being fed up with you. He just waits for you to start walking again, stiffly putting one foot in front of the other and reminding yourself that these are monsters.

It doesn’t help. You can’t prove it to yourself, so it doesn’t help. Asriel practically carries you the rest of the way. He doesn’t say a thing and you can only hope that’s through some intuition (who knows: he might actually have a scrap of sense in him, weirder things have happened) rather than because your expression gives it away.

Either way, eventually there’s gravel under your boots rather than the cobbles of the village streets, and you hear the creak of a wooden fence as Asriel leads you up to a door.

“Just a little more, okay?” he says quietly. You can’t for the life of you work out what he thinks he’s reassuring you about.

He knocks and your muscles clench up, gripping his arm tighter. There’s the sound of clattering from inside whatever this place is, and then – too soon, much too soon – the door opens with enough force to send the hinges squeaking in protest.

“Hello!” comes a cheerful voice that grates along your eardrums until you have to repress a shiver. “I,” the voice suddenly goes lofty and proud, “am the great witch Papyrus, and this is my equally great house where I conduct all sorts of great witchery and sorcery! It’s wonderful to have you here! Unless you didn’t want to come here, in which case it’s not-quite-so-wonderful, but still good, I’m sure!”

He seems to take a second to breathe and Asriel steps in. “It’s nice to meet you!” he says with all the ease of someone who’s never once had to internally rehearse a social interaction. “I’m Asriel Dreemurr and this is Chara…um, just Chara. My mother, Toriel, sent us to you because we were hoping you could help us with a curse…?”

“Why of course!” He sounds elated. Nice for some. “Wowie, a curse! I’ve never done one of those before! What kind is it? A sleeping curse? Love curse? Death curse? Should I get my special curse hat?”

There’s a cough somewhere in the house, you think, and then, “Don’t you think you should let ’em in first, bro?”

“An excellent idea for once, Sans, I’m proud of you!” There’s an odd clacking sound, like polished wood clattering together, but around the level of your head. Tools, maybe? “Yes, you should come in!”

A new clacking sound, against what sounds like a wooden floor, and then Asriel leads you through a door into the house. From the sounds alone, it seems spacious, and the room you’re in is permeated with the smell of failed cooking. The unfamiliarity of it all isn’t as suffocating as it might be. That might be thanks to the faint smell of burnt food in the air, though.  

Because he apparently deems it necessary, Asriel puts a hand on the small of your back and moves you across floor and rugs into an armchair. Then he’s gone and there’s a chill where his warmth was, skittering up your arm and down your spine as you’re left totally in the dark. You wish he’d speak, or _something_.

Instead, it’s the witch who talks first. “So where’s the curse?” He almost sounds eager.

Because you’re sick of everything being done for you, even though you’d quite like this done for you as well, you raise a hand and point at your flowers. They’ve been growing well, you think. They’re definitely heavier than they were before, and the petals are falling out less and less.

“It’s these.”

“Fascinating!”

‘ _Are they really, though?_ ’ you’d probably say if you weren’t at this moment utterly paralysed by the realisation that the witch is suddenly very, very close to you and that he’s probably about to touch you. You can’t tell where he is: he’s just _close_ and that’s more than enough to turn your flesh to rock and your blood to ice.

You’d think you’d be used to this by now.

“A-ah, I wouldn’t-!” Asriel says at the same time as the witch’s brother says “Bro, you might want to move back a tad there,” and then there are exuberant apologies and you understand that your reaction was probably visible. Horrifically so. As if this whole experience couldn’t possibly get worse.

“I’m sorry: I should have known better!” the witch says, an acceptable distance from you. “That wasn’t behaviour befitting someone as great as me!” And then, in a smaller voice, he says again, “I’m sorry, Chara, so…are you alright? Do you want to wait before trying to take off the curse? It’s no problem at all!”

You shake your head urgently. You’re already enough of a waste of space as it is, so you steel yourself and swallow down the humiliation. “Try. Please. It won’t happen again.”

There’s some creaking and then Asriel’s hand is next to yours on the armrest. “It should be okay,” he reassures the witch, his voice coming from behind your head. Compared to everything else, that doesn’t bother you as much: people can get used to anything, you suppose.

“Okie-dokie then!” Back to unparalleled joy and cheer, and then the air changes around you. There’s the bite of copper and a faint tingle that irritates your ears. You’ve never been particularly susceptible to magic, but you can feel his now: shapes spin and burst in the air around you – you can feel the air movement – the fragments wrapping around your eyes and flowers. You wonder if it looks like anything.

The witch – or Papyrus, you suppose – is humming faintly and utterly tunelessly, and then he says, “Just a friendly warning, but I’m going to have to touch you now! Is that okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“Wonderful! Don’t worry about a thing: the great Papyrus will have this all sorted out!”

You guess you can’t fault his bedside manner, though you think you’re going to have to start counting all the times people tell you not to worry because they’ll fix it all for you. Asriel alone could rack up a few hundred a day, probably.

And then your wondering is brought to an ugly stuttering stop when something smooth touches your cheeks. It’s not skin or fur or scale or anything you’d been expecting, and while that doesn’t exactly disturb you, it does get you curious. More so than the brush and buzz of magic you can feel poking around the flowers along with what you suppose are his fingers, you want to know what he looks like. You want to know what his brother looks like. You want to know what the house looks like. You want to know what Asriel looks like, if only to see if he looks as stupidly innocent as he acts. All of a sudden, there’s a burning desire for images to put to the voices and sounds and smells.

Papyrus pulls back from you after maybe a minute and the air loses the tang of metal. There are still flowers in between you and functioning sight, so things are pretty much what you expected, though that doesn’t stop the pang of disappointment.

“Gosh, I’m really sorry!” he says, which is never something you want to hear from a healer or healer-type person. “Polished and magnificent in many ways as my witchcraft is, I…um. Don’t really have any experience with curses like this? At all. I could help you with other things! For example, I would be delighted to help you with your flower maintenance! All the greenfly repellents you might need, all the watering spells your heart might desire, all the-”

“Bro.”

“Anyway! I’m afraid I cannot help you here. It’s a pretty strong curse.”

“Oh,” you say, because you were expecting this considering your luck, and while it’s a bit of a blow in that your plans to ditch Asriel are all awry, it’s nothing you hadn’t been planning around on some level.

“It’s okay!” Asriel says false-cheerfully. “We can try and find other witches with more experience in curses. Sorry for bothering you about this!” You think he might be bowing his head.

“No, no, it’s been a pleasure! And, if you aren’t in too much of a hurry, you could stay here for the night! In fact, you should! I’d be happy to be your host! And Sans probably would too.”

“Yeah, sure,” comes an ambivalent voice from somewhere across the room.

You’re about to refuse politely and get the hell out of the house while you can, but of course Asriel gets in there first. “We’d love to! Gosh, it’d be so nice to sleep in a proper bed after camping for the past few days.”

You…actually can’t argue with that, but that doesn’t stop you clenching your hand on his. Obediently, he bends his head down to ask softly, “Is something wrong?”

“We can’t just ask them to house us for the night,” you hiss.

Papyrus, apparently unaware that you were having a private conversation, chips in with “But of course you can! You really should! It would be my honour!”

“See?” Asriel says almost-smugly. “You don’t mind _too_ much, do you?”

There’s hope in his voice, you think. Really, who are you to deprive someone of a proper bed for a night just because of your own stupid shame? And the brothers don’t seem awful. Annoying, maybe, but not awful. Respectful. Probably too much, and you could really do without being treated like you’re made of glass and about to shatter, but it’s still a good thing in theory.

It’s the promise of a decent bed that gets you, though.

Stiffly, you shake your head, and you think the wind must pick up outside because there’s the faint sound of wind-chimes from somewhere. “I don’t mind.”

“Good,” Asriel breathes, and then his head isn’t so close to yours as he says, “We’d love to stay the night, if you’ll have us.”

 

It’s almost unnerving how good a real mattress feels after nights spent on sleeping rolls. There’s straw stuffed in it and it itches in places, but it’s still unfairly comfortable.

But you can’t get to sleep.

After the failed attempt at lifting the curse, Asriel went off into the village to pick up food and supplies and left you in the house with the brothers (you’re thankful he didn’t try and offer to take you along: clearly he does have some tact in him). Stiff and mechanical being your modus operandi around strangers, you don’t particularly want to remember it. It was awkward. It’s always awkward. But rather than ending in tears, it just ended with you getting stabbing pains every time you think about your less than stellar responses to questions, and you suppose that’s not too bad. Asriel saved you with his chatter when he came back for dinner anyway, so that wasn’t too bad either. Somehow you managed to wash yourself without needing help too, and that definitely wasn’t too bad. But then you got ready to sleep and it turned out there was only one bed.

Not too bad, but not exactly fucking great either.

Crickets chirp in unholy choruses outside, so you’re assuming the window’s open. That or there’s just a fuck-ton of crickets. You wouldn’t know: the room’s so hot that there might not even _be_ a window. You shrugged off the sheets an hour ago, stripped down to a shirt shortly after, but none of that is changing the fact that Asriel’s right next to you and he just never stops producing heat. It was fine when you were sleeping outside, fine when there was actually space between you, but now you have his back pressed up against yours and you don’t think you’re going to make it.

Restless, you turn over onto your back, trying to settle your head in the right way to keep the flowers comfortable. The warmth of his fur isn’t as bad against your side. Slowly – far too slowly for your liking – you feel a breeze start blowing and thus surmise that there must be an open window, after all. Mystery solved.

So that just leaves you and your thoughts.

You need to end this. If Papyrus had been able to undo the curse, that would have been one thing. That would have been fine: you could have parted ways like you’d wanted. But now you’re not so sure when the end’s coming, and you’d much rather bring it yourself than wait around for it.

It’s the principle of the thing, probably. You like principles. Principles and plans: pillars to keep everything stable when you feel like crumbling. And it was a good plan. Running away hadn’t been an issue: the money you’d have earned them by staying wasn’t nearly enough to offset the time and cost of hunting you down. So running away had been easy, but then things had gone south very quickly and the flowers had been the best option in sight. It _was_ a good plan. You just weren’t very good at carrying it out.

And now things have changed again. Your principles are being compromised every second you stay on this stupid chase, but still you’re here. Your thoughts are like fireflies in your mind: bright, impossible to ignore and totally relentless, and you catch yourself trying to open your eyes to escape them. Stupid. You’re so stupid. There’s only blackness, no matter what you do.

Asriel breathes steadily next to you. There’s a hint of snuffle to it, but he’s not snoring (a pity: you’d like the excuse to kick someone). It’s steady and you concentrate on it, feeling his warmth and the sound of him sleeping, and something inside you calms. Even the crickets outside become more like background noise than a buzzing fit to eat you from the eardrum out. So you keep focussing on him.

You wish you knew what he looked like. Big. Tall. Soft. Claws and muscle; fluff and layers of fat. That’s nowhere near helpful. You want to know what he looks like when he smiles, when he does his nervous laugh, when he reassures you that you’ll be fine (what does he know?), when you say something you thought was normal but which silences him for a few minutes. More to the point, his being a monster means you have no point of reference at all. It’s unfair.

Almost unthinkingly, you stretch out your hand as if you’d be able to reach his face, touch it without waking him up, but you stop before you get past his shoulder. For a moment, you rest your fingers there, weighing up the situation.

You take your hand back, roll back onto your side, and will yourself to go to sleep so you can wake up surly and annoyed, not whatever this is. There are too few boundaries at night. Nothing seems real.

Fidgeting with the bandages of your almost-healed hands, you fall asleep.

 

Breakfast’s a rushed affair (against Papyrus’ best efforts) and the two of you set off early, while the humidity of dew is still in the air and everything feels just a little too cold. You keep close to Asriel as the two of you walk down more cobbles that eventually flatten out into the dirt track you’re used to.

He’s barely said a thing to you all morning: all you know is that he was already awake when you woke up and that he seemed unnecessarily flustered – in too much of a hurry to run to the washroom and give you space to get dressed.

So of course you have to be the one to bring the subject up. “How long until the next witch on your list?”

“Huh? Uh…two days, maybe? We’ve got enough food for it, don’t worry. And we’ll be following a river up into the hills, so we’ll actually have fresh water this time! No more stealing from wells.”

“Pity. Hearing you apologise to angry farmers was objectively the best part of this damn journey.”

He laughs and you’re caught off guard. You think it might be the time you’ve made him laugh through something you’ve said.

But then he’s back to the babying.

“Watch your foot there!” He pulls you into his side, changing course. “Sorry, there was a giant pothole.”

Shrugging, you try and unstick yourself from his side. There goes your good feeling for the morning. The two of you slip into silence aside from the crunch under your feet, and you try to listen to the infuriatingly off-key morning chorus. It’s something to listen to, at least. Apparently Asriel’s feeling meek today and won’t chatter at you. He laughs, though: a soft exhale with a smile in it, and there’s not enough bitterness in you to keep you from asking.

“What?”

“What? Oh, sorry, it was just a rabbit. Got scared by a bird taking off. It was just kind of cute, but I guess it doesn’t sound like much,” he says with what sounds like his self-deprecating, embarrassed grin, and you’ve had enough.

“Then how about you _describe_ it?”

“Huh?” He sounds understandably taken aback by the venom in your voice, but too bad for him.

“Have you tried just fucking talking to me?! Just describe it! I’m not a kid, I'm not an idiot-” debatable, but for the sake of argument you pretend, “-I'm just blind, so fucking describe it to me rather than leaving me in the dark and acting like babying me is going to make that better!”

You’ve both stopped walking and you’re certain you’re facing him now, gripping his hand so tightly you can feel the bone. No protests, no smoothing over your hurt feelings, so you think you might have left him speechless. You wish you could see his face, but there’s no helping that and you’ve already started letting all your frustrations out on him so you might as well finish it off.

“I can’t see anything, okay? I’m used to seeing things. This is a shock for me and it doesn’t help when you try and do everything for me. The one thing I can’t do is see, so it would be _nice_ , for once, if rather than trying to take over my life, you just described things for me. Fuck, I’m not saying do it all the time or anything, I’m not that selfish, but just…” You take a deep breath, feeling it shiver out through your fingertips. “What did Papyrus and Sans look like?”

“Skeletons,” he says abruptly.

“…skeletons.”

“Mm.” His voice is stiff. “Papyrus was tall, almost as tall as me, and Sans came to about your shoulders. Both skeletons.”

“Oh.”

Something seems to crack and then all the emotion comes back into his voice and he’s holding your hands just as tightly as you’re holding his. “Oh gosh, Chara, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t even realise! I’m such an idiot, I just thought…I thought, because you’re so quiet, because you’ve obviously got a lot of things to think about and secrets to keep and all – and that’s totally okay! – I just thought you wouldn’t want me to do that, I guess? I don’t know! But I just…I talk when I’m nervous so I ended up talking to fill the space anyway, and it never once occurred to me that I might describe things, I just thought…I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

He sounds it, too. You think you can hear tears at the edge of his voice. Which, of course, leaves the problem: what are you supposed to say? Are you supposed to comfort him about this? Lost for words, you shake your head. It seems to be enough.

“Okay,” he sucks in a deep breath. “I’ll try. Should I just go ahead and describe the scenery?”

“Uh, yeah, sure…”

“Right.” He gently tugs you into a walk again. “Um. So. We’re on a long road: it’s got tracks either side where carts have left their mark in it. It’s sort of yellowish-brown. It’s winding around a series of fields: there’s tall grass to the left, it’s a kind of greener-than-olive green, but the breeze is rippling it so the top looks like silver waves on a calm sea. The sky above has kind of ribbon-like clouds, all pink and grey because it’s still early, like crinkled satin with the light reflecting every which way, and-”

You can’t help yourself: you burst out laughing, holding your stomach and wheezing.

“What?!” He sounds put out, and rightly so, you guess.

“Sorry, sorry, I just…” you try and collect yourself, “The way you _describe_ things!” And the fact that you can picture it, the fact that you’re finally getting some kind of visual feedback.

He sniffs. “Well, I was trying. Sorry, I’ll keep it less vivid.”

“No, don’t.” You feel a grin sneaking across your face and it feels good: it feels like it’s been so long since you really smiled. “I like it.”

There’s a short pause and what sounds like a jackdaw taking the opportunity to shriek a bit.

Then he sighs. “You really like it?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t just want to make fun of me?”

“I can like it and still want to make fun of you. But I do. Keep doing it. It’s…it’s really nice.” You’re not lying, either. Even just talking is keeping your mind off your plans, and that feels nice too.

 It’s gratifying to hear the smile back in his voice where it belongs when he speaks next. “I’ll keep at it, then, if you like it.”

And – with enthusiasm and imagination – he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got a lot longer than I was expecting, but what with how the chapters are split up, I couldn't just upload half of it. Anyway. Writing Papyrus hurts me, but the 'Looks like we'll have to share a bed, oh no' trope makes up for it.


	3. The Witch of Spear and Blade

Among the many things Asriel saw fit to buy in the village along with food, the one you’re most growing to appreciate is a cloak charmed to repel water. You refused it the first day, pride being worth more than your health and comfort ( _always_ ), but the rain kept up cheerfully into the second day and Asriel’s pleading finally wore you down.

Not to be outdone, you managed to get him to give you the sleeping rolls and blankets to carry in a makeshift pack. Small victories.

“The rain’s so pretty!”

“Is it.” You’re already tugging your cloak around you, bitterly wishing you’d stayed longer under the shelter of trees for lunch, but he’d been so impatient to get going that you hadn’t really had the heart to point out how wet you feel, inside and out. It’s been raining for almost a whole day straight now. He says it’s because you’ve made it into the foothills, but that’s not exactly comforting. Actually, it’s the opposite, because all you know about the hills is that they’re humid and cold, neither of which you’re looking forward to.

Asriel makes an enthusiastic sound. “The forest’s closing in around us now, and it’s so green!”

“Foliage tends to be.”

“Don’t be snide. I mean, it’s like we’ve just plunged into a sea of it, or like the forest’s a living creature: every leaf that moves under the weight of raindrops is like a breath, shaking the colour up into silver and green and dark, dark brown.”

You can hear that: the whispers of leaves and the thrum of rain drown out everything else but the steady crunch of your boots on the path. It smells enough like rain too, which, you’ll admit, is preferable to the farm smells from before. But it’s still wet, and all the fun of rain is gone if you can’t see it.

“The sky’s so bright, too.” He’s not out of poetic steam yet. “The clouds cover everything, like raw wool hanging from the heavens.”

You manage to bite your tongue before you can laugh at him: perfectly understandably, he doesn’t like it when you do that.

“And the rain’s like…I guess it’d be too easy to say like diamonds? But it really is. It’s so bright, Chara: every drop’s dazzling. Mum used to call this type of weather fairy rain.”

“Now why would she do that?” You allow yourself to be dragged to the side without a fuss, only because you’re embarrassingly used to it by now.

“Sorry, puddle. Because fairies come out in it: it’s the best weather to catch them in, she said. For harvesting wings and so on.”

Making a noise of interest, you tilt your head up. You can feel the rain hit the petals over your eyes, slipping off them to trickle down your face and around your mouth. You try and imagine the scene he’s painting for you.

“She didn’t do it a lot, though. You can’t go capturing too many: they won’t come near your house after a while if they don’t trust you. And you need to be kind, too: obviously we did the usual things, like leaving out milk for brownies and neat gin for goblins and all the rest of it, but it was also a matter of keeping the forest free of poachers so no blood was spilled there without necessity or a ritual to make up for it. Needless blood, that sort of thing. Unicorns hate that, you know. They don’t come round very often, but there’s always trouble if someone’s killed something without saying the magic words or whatever to make sure the animal’s respected. Oh, but speaking about paying respects, don’t even get me _started_ on the naiads: I’ve never known any species to be so particular!”

By now you’ve more than gathered that this sort of thing is normal for him, growing up in what was apparently the biggest hub of magical creatures in the entire country. Trust you to stumble in there without realising. So you listen and nod occasionally, waiting for his just-too-late warnings as he spins you stories of creatures you had barely even believed in before he came along.

Not to say that the belief of magical creatures is dead, by any means. You knew that first hand, of course, even if you never believed. It was difficult to have faith in the existence of creatures whose sins you were always punished for despite never having seen them in your life. So even if you accepted monsters (it’d have been hard not to, with them integrating more each year), fairies and unicorns and the rest of the fey were a very different story. But he makes them sound real. Even if you’d have liked to avoid this particular subject, that’s worth something.

“-so anyway, we still haven’t worked out who the werewolf is, but they come to the forest every month and Dad goes out to be with them. He’s never actually told me what they do together. Have tea, probably, knowing him. Oh, the path’s curving round to the right here. So, um, what about you?”

You look in his direction and get a thin spray of rain over your face for your trouble. Petals aren’t forgiving in this weather. “What do you mean?”

“Just…have you ever had those sorts of experiences with the fey? They’re a weird bunch: pretty much any interaction lends itself to a story. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever had a ‘normal’ meeting with one.”

Oh, damn, he had to ask. You clamp down tightly on the memories you’d been avoiding. “No. I’ve never seen any.”

“Really?” Another spray of rain: you suppose he turned to look at you. “I thought you must have…You’re…you seem so like them, kind of? Cool and mysterious,” he laughs lightly. “Like you’re not quite huma-”

“Shut up.”

The rain really is loud: it rushes in to fill the silence between you two. His arm is like rock as you pull him forwards, obstinately walking up the hill regardless of how he seems content to stand still and gawp. Well, he’s probably gawping. What you wouldn’t give to see his expression right now.

But it’s your fault that he’s not saying anything, even his usual hurried apology, so it’s your place to build the bridge between you again and make things right. You were being unfair. This isn’t conducive to a good relationship between travellers. It’s your fault, even if his words are still tingling like hot coals in your ears.

Your fault.

“Tell me more about them,” you say eventually. “The fey. You have to have more stories, right? Tell me more.”

“…oh. Um, yeah. Okay. I guess…the best one is probably from when I was around ten? I was out playing, doing the kind of thing ten year olds do, and it got to be twilight and Mum still hadn’t called me back so, me being an adventurous little soul, I thought ‘Hey, you know what would be great? If I wandered even further into the forest, long past all the landmarks and familiar paths. Just wander right into the heart of this place that Mum and Dad are always telling me I should be wary of.’ Needless to say, it wasn’t actually that great.”

There’s a thin smile on your face and you hope he’s looking at it. He doesn’t give much evidence one way or the other.

“Well, I guess that’s not fair. It was fun. Basically, a bunch of naiads found me and decided I’d make a wonderful addition to their party. Naiads do love kids. I was terrified at first, too scared to even cry, but after a while of being with these sparkly, abnormally attractive people who just wanted to give me nice things to eat and drink, I warmed up to the idea. There was a lot of dancing, lots of singing, I had way more fairy wine than any kid should probably ever ingest, and then Mum found me and I wasn’t allowed out of the house for a week.” He laughs. “Good times.”

“Did you ever see them again?” The hill’s getting steeper and it’s just plain unfair that your breath is heavy and painful in your throat while he apparently has no trouble talking like normal.

“Oh, yeah, a few times. They lost interest after I hit thirteen or so. No more wild naiad parties for me. Oh, wait, Chara, let’s stop a second!”

You’re brought to a halt and turned gently around. As far as you can tell, nothing’s the matter, so you take the chance to catch your breath surreptitiously.

“This is so nice! We’re on the edge of a hairpin turn and there’s a break in the trees and I can see so much! It’s like the world’s opening up just for us, the sun shining so brightly against the river that it might as well be metal!”

You wait patiently for him to finish singing the view’s praises and lead you back up the track. It sounds nice: you’ll give him that. Since you’re actually talking together now, it’s begun to feel more like a journey and less like a chore or a means to an end. Stopping to take in the view, taking detours that he likes the look of even if they’re unmarked, all the small things you can’t exactly appreciate except in spirit. And if they slow down your eventual goal, well, who are you to object? If you’re going to be a coward, you might as well have fun with it.

Not that you truly believe that, but saying it helps.

“Hey, Chara?” he mumbles once you’re back to walking. “I said something wrong, before, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

You shrug and bend your head a little so your hood falls further over your face. “It’s fine.”

“If it’s not…if it’s not too much, what was the part that was wrong? So I can avoid it in future.”

“Just don’t ask after my past.”

“Oh.” It’s only when his voice grows a bit more distant that you realise he must have turned away. “That’s fair. I won’t.”

That settled, you move closer to his warmth and concentrate on keeping your breathing steady as you climb up the hill.

 

The mist creeps up on you like avoided responsibilities, gently adding itself to the perpetual drizzle until you can barely breathe without it feeling like you’re underwater. The constant thundering of what sounds like the river’s source just solidifies that impression. It’s evening, you’re cold, you’re tired, you’re miserable, and Asriel’s not helping at all.

“This is so beautiful!” he keeps saying, as if that’s going to change your opinion that this is the worst idea you’ve ever agreed to go along with. “I mean yeah, okay, it’s a little wet-”

“A _little_ ,” you repeat icily.

“Um, very wet, very wet indeed. But trust me, it’s worth it! The mist is pouring over the trees like an extension of the river, just this big, thick blanket of grey and silver: I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Marvellous. How fucking far until the village.”

He sighs. “Half an hour more, maybe? It’s pretty close, but the next part’s all slippery and rocky and getting you down is going to be difficult.” You think he might be biting his lip, from the faint muffling of his voice. “I’ll admit that this may not have been the best idea for a shortcut.”

Your pride has already been shredded to hell and back by this point, so you’re not even surprised when you ask, “How much quicker would it be if you carried me?”

“….what?”

You click your tongue, unable to believe that he’s actually going to make you say it again. “You’re huge, right? I can take the pack and you can carry me on your back and we can get somewhere dry quicker, _right_?”

A few seconds of rapids crashing behind you, of silt and wet soil sinking beneath your boots.

“…uh. Yeah. Um. We could do that.”

Neither of you move and you think about tapping your foot impatiently but decide that that might come off as a little petulant.

Instead, you say (petulantly), “Well, if His Highness is _ready_.”

“Oh, sorry!” Thankfully, he seems to have broken out from his daydream, and he hands you the pack to put on. After some rearrangement of your own, you’re finally carrying both of them, equal to about three quarters of your body weight, if you’re any judge. Maybe he was onto something, telling you that you shouldn’t carry it.

“Uh, I’m…” there are rustles, “I’m bending down now. You should be able to get on?”

Reaching your hands out to feel your way, you locate him and somehow manage to hoist yourself onto his back, and he straightens up after making sure his hands are supporting your thighs and yours are around his neck. Even through the rain-repellent cloak, you can feel his warmth.

“Onwards,” you say, feeling decidedly better now you’re not absolutely freezing. He laughs, which warms you up too, and then he’s moving and there’s just the rhythm to watch out for, to make sure you’re not about to slide off.

You have to admit you’re impressed he’s able to carry you and the packs down what feels like a really tricky bit of ground. He’s barely even breathing heavily when it’s done. In stark (and mildly embarrassing) contrast, _your_ heartrate is still recovering from the fear that tends to go hand in hand with potentially falling down a cliff you can’t see with no way of saving yourself. You think your hands might be permanently welded together around his neck, you’ve been holding on so tightly.

“Should I….um, should I let you down now?”

“Unless you feel like carrying me all the way,” you say, layering on sarcasm that somehow completely goes over his head.

“Oh, I can do that.”

It doesn’t seem worth it to protest, so you let yourself be carried through what Asriel assures you is a very pretty, very wet hamlet in the middle of the mountains.

“We’re coming up to what looks like the right house now: should I let you down?”

“ _Yes_.”

He seems to catch on this time and you find yourself lowered to sodden grass, only given enough time to get your balance before the weight of the pack isn’t there anymore, leaving you vaguely disoriented. And then his arm’s there instead, steering you through the unrepentant drizzle until you hear him knock.

The door opens after a few seconds, and a gruff voice says, “Yeah?”

“You’re the witch Undyne, right? I’m Asriel Dreemurr, this is Chara, we’re here about a curse.”

The witch takes a moment to let this sink in (which for some reason makes Asriel tense up beside you) and then she says in a much more cheerful voice, “Yeah, sure, come in! Can’t say I know much about curses, but I can give it a shot.”

You’re starting to despair that there’s a witch in the entire country who knows about curses besides the one who cursed you (though why that should make you despair is beyond you, so you put a stop to it immediately). But you’re brought into a warm, dry room, and your wet cloak and pack are helped off you so you don’t have it in you to complain.

The witch – Undyne – moves across the squeaking floorboards and you angle your head to whisper to Asriel as he hangs up your clothes or whatever he’s doing. “What does she look like?”

“Huh? Uh…kind of fish-like? Very red hair, finned ears, muscular-”

“You’re forgetting ‘totally awesome’,” Undyne calls across the room companionably. Asriel makes an _eep_ sound and draws back from you, probably to hang his head in shame. You, having no such reservations, manage to smile despite still feeling like you’ve drowned several times over in the last hour.

“Come over here, kid: there’s a fire.”

Appreciating that she doesn’t try to lead you, you carefully make your way to where you heard Undyne’s voice, feeling out a table and chairs and what feels like overly-polished wood of some kind as you go. Your hands brush over wooden poles hooked to the wall which, as you follow them to their tips, turn out to be well-kept spears. You nick your finger on the top of one, just to make sure.

“Over to your left there,” Undyne says, and you reach out to find a chair that feels like it’s in front of the fireplace. Gratefully, you sit down, calculating how rude it would be to shake your wet hair out all over what might possibly be a carpet. Asriel joins you when his humiliation allows him to. From what you hear, Undyne doesn’t sit down: considering what you know of her, you fancy she’s probably crossing her arms and looking intimidating.

“So I take it those flowers are the problem, right? You want me to try and get rid of them?”

“Please.” Your voice comes out a little croaky, but not too bad, you think, and it’s better than having Asriel do _all_ your talking for you.

“Okay, but they’re pretty fucking sick, just so you know. You sure?”

You casually move yourself a bit closer to the fire, hoping it dries out your soaked boots soon. “Artificial blindness isn’t really working out for me.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” A creak of something that sounds like leather. “Any idea why you were cursed? I’m going to need some sort of emotion to focus it on.”

You really, really don’t want to admit it. Even bringing the words up into your mouth leaves a bitter taste that chills you right down to your feet, regardless of the fire and Asriel’s warmth in the chair next to you. But you can’t exactly avoid it forever, and not answering would just be awkward for everyone. So you keep it vague.

“Vengeance, probably. Or punishment.”

“Hardcore,” Undyne says sagely. “Well yeah, I guess I can work with that. Want to just wait there a bit? I can cook something up.”

“You can what now,” you say at the same time as Asriel frantically insists that she needn’t put herself to so much trouble, you just got there, she doesn’t need to go out of her way, all that stuff.

“Dude, calm down!” She’s across the room now, or maybe into a new room: the echoing is different. “You’re worse than your old man!”

“You know my dad?”

She scoffs, accompanied by the alarming sound of several knives shrieking across whetstones. “Do I know your dad – of course I know him! Great guy, best drinking partner I’ve ever had.”

There are some enthusiastic chopping sounds. You just stay peacefully in your chair, enjoying the warmth and the fact that the conversation neither features nor requires you anymore.

“Uh…” Asriel gets up and goes to her, from the sound of it. “You mean drinking tea, right?”

“That too.” She promptly bursts into sort-of-but-not-really-unkind laughter which you assume to be because of Asriel’s expression.

“He won’t even let me bring alcohol inside the _house_ ,” he grouses. You hope he’s crossing his arms. Then he makes another, slightly more panicked _eep_ sound as something bursts into flame. It sounds a lot fiercer than the crackling next to you.

“Of course he doesn’t: you’re just a kid!”

“I’m basically an adult! And you can’t be _that_ much older than me.”

“Eh,” she audibly shrugs. “I was a precocious child. Take it from me: check the back of the closet if you want the really good stuff.”

“ _That’s_ where he keeps it? I’d have thought he’d go for the cellar or something…”

“Oh, he kept it there once. Before I got to it!” Her laughter’s drowned out by sizzling accompanied by an unpleasant screech of water hitting hot metal. Well, you think it’s that. It might just as well be an animal screaming its last for all you know. Your boots feel dry enough, so you get up and ungracefully make your way to the heat of what’s probably the kitchen. Asriel makes room for you in the doorway and, in the absence of a fire, you move closer to his side. His fur doesn’t even feel damp and you resent him for it.

Curiosity gets the better of you (a running pattern these days: you should probably put a stop to that). “What are you doing?”

“Cooking up a potion.” Demonstratively, something starts bubbling.

Asriel takes pity on the confusion that’s probably all over your face (or rather, the parts of your face that aren’t otherwise occupied being covered by flowers). “Witches have loads of different techniques and specialities. Papyrus’ magic was very different to this, right?”

“You went to see Papyrus?” Some more bubbling, something squeaks.

“Yeah, but he couldn’t do anything. Said he didn’t know enough about curses.”

“Of course he doesn’t: I taught him. Ah, I love that guy. Does he still have special hats all over the place? He says they help him focus.”

“Is that what they’re for? They were on every wall.”

Undyne laughs coarsely. “Fucking sweet. Glad to see some things don’t change. Come to think of it, who else are you off to see if this doesn’t work?”

“Um…” Asriel scrabbles in his pocket and you graciously stop leaning on him so he has room. “I’ve got a list here-”

Undyne snatches it from him, uncrumpling the paper while something hisses in the background. The sound’s getting steadily louder. “Oh, these are all hacks. Nah, kid, if you want to get _anything_ done, you’re going to want to go _here_.”

She seems to scribble something down and Asriel moves over to look at it. “In the city? I didn’t think witches set up there unless they were sell-outs.”

“Trust me! You won’t get better results anywhere else.”

“Well, if you say so. It’s not totally out of our way.”

You don’t particularly like the sound of going to a city, but you figure you can argue that one later. Or this potion could actually work, but you’re not holding out for that, not with how loud the hissing is getting. It sounds like it’s reaching a peak, actually. You just have the time to think this before Asriel’s arms are around your head, pulling you out of the way as something explodes.

For a few moments, there’s just the smell of burning and vinegar, for some reason, and then Undyne says, “Ah, it’s ready.”

“I’m sorry, what?” You extricate yourself from Asriel’s arms (no small feat). “That thing just exploded.”

“Yeah, it’s all part of the process! What, you think I make wuss potions?” She sounds pleased with herself, and you don’t seem in imminent danger (except by poisoning, perhaps) so you let your indignation drop. She’s easy to be around, or at least she likes teasing Asriel and you can appreciate that, so it amounts to the same thing.

“Are you okay? Nothing hit you?” Asriel seems to have recovered himself.

Nodding curtly, you straighten out your clothes. “You?”

“Uh, I think I got some on my back, but it’s not burning or anything.”

“Yeah, the rash comes later,” Undyne says cheerfully, and then laughs at Asriel’s whine. You find yourself smiling too.

“Don’t sweat it!” There’s a thick glopping sound. “Only people with scales come out in rashes. First-hand experience.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I am! What, don’t you trust me? Anyway, Chara, drink this.”

A mug is shoved into your unwilling hands. Something new to add to the advantages of being blind: you don’t have to see the potion you’re inevitably going to have to drink. You sniff it tentatively. Vinegar and something that stings your nose, making you wrinkle it up. Undyne laughs at that too.

“It’s not going to kill you, kid! Just drink it!”

“Chara, if it’s really horrible, you don’t _have_ to…”

“Yeah, they do!”

It’s Asriel’s babying more than anything else which makes you lift the mug to your lips and drink down as much as you can. It burns your throat, still slightly raw from the buttercups, but it tastes better than what you remember of _them_ so you keep drinking. Undyne’s happily cheering “Chug, chug, chug!” and that helps. But you can’t stop the gag when you lower the empty mug.

“Oh, fuck, that was _foul_ …” you choke. Another mug is immediately pressed into your hands.

“Elderflower syrup,” Asriel says. “It should help.”

Very little could be worse than the potion, and ‘syrup’ sounds promising, so you down it as well, not bothering to pay attention as Undyne calls him out on looking through her cupboards. It’s as sweet as the name promised, easily smoothing down your throat and reminding you that the ability to taste isn’t so bad after all. There’s something heady in the aftertaste, warming you through even more surely than the kitchen and the other two’s bickering does.

Your mouth doesn’t feel so full of death once you finish it, and the three of you stand waiting for a minute or two. You begin to think that food might be welcome: now you’re drying out nicely, you feel empty, and considering how much you can feel your body rebelling at the idea of going back outside tonight you hope Undyne will let you stay. With any luck, you can get Asriel to describe the house for you and it’ll feel even less hostile. Thus content, you wait for the others to say something; time slips by and your flowers are still as healthy as ever.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” Undyne eventually says in the verbal version of a shrug.

“It’s supposed to be that fast-acting? Shouldn’t we wait longer?” Asriel asks anxiously as you finally search out a counter to put the mugs on, released from their wavering anticipation.

“Nah, it’s not worked. But they’re not dead either! Halfway success.”

“They could have died?” His voice is unnervingly growl-like and you wish he’d stop being so embarrassing.

“Dude, joke! Anyway, you’re going to want to stick around for the night, yeah? I’m going to host the hell out of you, just you watch!”

Leaning back on a counter you hope isn’t covered with exploded potion, you say, “Is it a common characteristic for witches to want to be hosts or do we just have spectacularly good luck?”

“Hah! Papyrus learnt everything he knows from me, if that’s what you mean.”

Sounding more than a little put out, Asriel says, “Okay, he can’t be _that_ much younger than you.”

“Of course he’s not. I’m just _that_ much cooler!”

You’re inclined to agree, so you let yourself be moved out of the way while she starts cooking dinner (Asriel has to shield you from flying ingredients no less than three times). You can’t even find it in yourself to be disappointed.

 

In the morning, you both manage to sleep in – seduced by real beds and blankets that aren’t constantly damp – and Undyne wakes you up by pulling said blankets off you and shouting a lot. She pushes you cheerfully out of the door as she goes out for her morning training, and after a quick goodbye (and a gift of tea for her which Asriel found at the bottom of the pack last night), you set off. Mercifully, the fog’s died down.

The trip down the hills isn’t as bad as it was going up. It barely even rains. You’ve completely woken up by mid-morning (all that fresh air, you suppose), but Asriel’s still groggy hours after you’ve left Undyne’s house.

“The path curves to the left a bit here, puddles all over it shining like liquid silver, and a-ah…” –here he yawns- “there’s a tree hanging pretty low, so watch your head to the right, and oh, gosh…” –another yawn- “the path’s getting kind of thin: you can see it winding round the hills below us like someone threw string down on them or something, so-oh…” another, and by this point you’re yawning too, so you hit him.

“Let’s stop for lunch. You’re going to make me drop off,” you spit in a vaguely friendly way, and he doesn’t object. The drizzle’s mostly gone, too (small blessings), so you can sit in the wet grass on your cloaks. In return for the tea, Undyne had shoved a heavy bag of apples onto you and you eat them after lunch. Asriel gets through at least four, you can hear, even if he tries to hide it.

“Are you upset we didn’t get the curse lifted?” he asks at one point, his voice distant.

“Not really.” It’s not a lie. “I didn’t think it would be that easy.”

“Did you want it to be?”

And go back to your shredded plans? Maybe. If it were only a matter of honour, then yes. But it’s not. It’s a matter of comfort too, and you can’t pretend you’re not comfortable with him, on this stupid, pointless journey. As long as he never has to find out how things started, everything’s fine.

So you repeat, “Not really.”

“Oh.” It’s barely a breath, almost washed away in the wind, but you take the hint and move closer to his side. There are worse kinds of physical interaction, and you know it makes him happy.

“Aren’t you angry? You’re still blind.”

You shrug. “I miss it, but it’s not terrible, being without sight. I’ve got you, haven’t I?” You can practically hear him preening at that. A thought strikes you, curiosity baring its teeth again. The question’s come back to you time and time again, too many nights to ignore it. You _really_ ought to put a stop to this, but before you can, you say, “What do you look like?”

The question takes him by surprise, clearly. “Huh?”

You repeat it.

“Me? Uh, I’m…tall…”

Awkward laughter slips through your teeth. “Not good at describing when it comes to yourself?”

“Not really, sorry…”

“It doesn’t matter.” But it does, so you say, “Turn to me.”

He does without questioning you, and you reach your hands up to his face. You can feel him freeze up under your fingers but he doesn’t draw back, so you don’t either. Lightly, so lightly your fingers barely brush his fur, you feel up to his forehead. You need to sit up on your knees to do it, and then he bends his head for you and you aren’t stretching your arms so much anymore.

There’s the softness of hair among the finer fur at his scalp, slightly curled from the humidity, probably, and you follow it up to the bases of horns. They’re rough, like broken stone, and he leans even further down so you can feel them to their points. At the barest poke of his forehead, he straightens up so you can trace down his face, feeling strange tufts of fur almost like sideburns that cross over his cheeks, the silky-softness of his eyelids as he keeps them closed for you, the jut of his nose, his jaw, his mouth. He’s stopped breathing, you think, so you pull your fingers back, curling them up like the slightest of apologies.

Immediately, his breath comes again – heavy this time. You almost wish the rain were back so you could pretend you hadn’t noticed his hitch in composure.

But it helped.

You rest back on your hands, lifting your chin so you’re facing the sky. “You can calm down now. Sorry.”

“N-no, gosh, it wasn’t like that! You just caught me off guard! Sorry.”

“Look, we can’t _both_ apologise for it. Take yours back.”

“I’m not going to do that.” You’re glad to hear there’s a smile back in his voice. “Well. At least I’m fully awake now.”

“No kidding.”

You lapse into silence, waiting for the chill to set in. There are birds singing in trees far away, but near you two there’s only the rustle of wind through trees; the occasional drop of water onto grass as it’s shaken down from the leaves. You’re just beginning to think that a second apple might not be a bad idea when Asriel speaks.

“Can I see your hands?”

Perhaps this is in retaliation. You lift them up for him all the same. He hadn’t needed to put bandages on them the night before: they just need air now. Your skin was never good at healing; you know you’re going to have scars.

He says as much, far more regretfully than you would have, but at least he sounds normal again now. “We should see about getting some oil next time we go through a village.”

“Why?”

“Your hands are all dried out. Can’t you feel it?”

You can, but it’s always been like that. A sickening mix of blue veins and grey-pink splotches, dashed with red across your knuckles. Thin skin, unhealthy skin, too dry and too easily cut. Even on your face, it’s never been pretty.

“That’s normal.”

He harrumphs. “It shouldn’t be. Constant moisture will help with the healing too: that’s what Mum always says.”

Waving your free hand around, you say dryly, “Is this not enough moisture for you?”

“That’s _different_. Moisture like this just makes it worse.”

“How does that even make sense?”

He pauses a second. “I’m not sure. But that’s definitely what she said! You know how skin gets really dry if you do cleaning or laundry? Um, it does, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, it does.” You know that well enough. “It still sounds made up. Well, whatever. If you want to buy me oil that badly, by all means, go ahead. I won’t stop you.”

“Will you really not?” His voice is a mix between scepticism and hope, not exactly what you were aiming for, but you can work with that.

Praying you’re in the right direction, you flash him a smile. “Of course I won’t.”

He hesitates a second and then, so softly that you don’t even understand at first, presses a kiss to your knuckles. “I’d be happy if you’d let me help heal you, then.”

The breath catches in your throat and you can’t even summon enough to ask him what the hell he did that for. A moment more to recover, and you consider hitting him for daring to turn the conversation like that. But at the same time….

At the same time.

You don’t have the denial in you to act like you’d choose buttercups over this. Even if you’re living on borrowed time, that’s no reason to stop, to not go all the way with your disgrace. Maybe you’re a coward for it – and really, there’s no ‘maybe’ about it – maybe you’re useless, worthless, sickening, pointless, hopeless, anything at all: you’ve called yourself all of that before, a hundred times over, so it doesn’t matter as much.

Just for now, you want to let yourself have this, even if it’s nowhere near the redemption you’re supposed to be seeking.

You smile at him again, take your hand back firmly, and reach for another apple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was while I was writing this one that I realised I could probably have spun this idea into a full novel(la). Well. Missed opportunities, I guess - at least I'm enjoying it.  
> (That was a very roundabout way of saying I've decided it's going to be 5 chapters long)


	4. The Witch of Cogs and Springs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains misgendering, mentions of past trauma, and is a fair bit more violent than the others (with a lot more ruminating, too, but hey)

You’ve never walked this much in your life before. After the hills, the two of you trail round valleys and fields again, passing through spreading moors and swamps Asriel has to carry you through because it’s too unsteady underfoot. There are monster villages and human villages every so often, and though you’ll never go in the latter, you follow him through the former. Sticking to his side, admittedly, but you still _go_.

None of the witches are able to help. The soft, gentle woman who brings you out under the stars to call on their help comes up with nothing; she offers you pastries to make up for it. The nervous, terrified monster who plays you music to soothe your soul can’t wither the flowers away and it takes Asriel all night to console them. The apathetic, cynical man you go to last isn’t even a witch anymore: he says he switched jobs to something more soul-sucking but slightly better paid. Staying with him is an experience. You and Asriel have the worst headaches the morning after.

It’s apparently a bright day: Asriel won’t stop complaining about it. Completely unsympathetic in your nice, cool, dark circlet of flowers, you pull him along the road, your arms linked as they always are.

“Chara…” he whines, for perhaps the thirtieth time. It’s not even midday.

“I don’t know what you’re complaining to _me_ for. _You’re_ the one who kept buying him drinks. And then it was all ‘No Chara, we have to drink too! It’s polite!’” you say in a mockery of his voice. It’s quite good, if you do say so yourself. It’d have to be, after listening to him basically non-stop for a month or so.

“You drank too!”

“You pushed the drinks into my hands!” you shout at him maybe a little louder than is called for, just to hear him whine in pain.

“I do that for everything – it doesn’t stop you refusing half the stuff I want to give you!”

“A gross exaggeration. It’s your fault, anyway. Who the fuck gives a blind person a centipede?”

He opens his mouth and starts to say something, pauses, and you can hear him close it again. Then, trying again, “I’ve apologised for that already.”

“And you can damn well do it again.”

Sighing, he apologises with a touch too much indulgence for your liking, but you’ll live. You don’t really care anyway: it’s just part of the game.

Both of you take a break from shouting to let your headaches rest, and he falls into step next to you instead of lagging behind. It’s probably a beautiful day, all stupid mistakes from the recent past considered. The sunlight isn’t too strong on your back, you can feel wind whispering through crops of some kind, and you haven’t yet slipped into the deep trenches at either side of the packed-dirt road, no matter how scared Asriel seemed to be that you would.

But it’s not good enough that you can just enjoy that: you need to have a goal, or it’ll all be meaningless, you’re sure. It’s a feeling of hollow propriety and duty to your past wishes – responsibility and redemption that you _have_ to keep remembering because you’re lost if you don’t. You think.

“Where are we going next?”

Asriel mutters something darkly, probably cursing your audacity for daring to speak, and fumbles with the list he still somehow has in his pocket. “Uh…I think…we’ve either been to them or we’ve been warned off them by someone else.”

“What, all of them?”

“Unless you want to walk all the way to the border, yeah. Or we could go searching round the countryside for witches Mum isn’t contacts with, or…wait. There’s that one witch Undyne recommended.”

You cast your mind back and meet with surprisingly little resistance, considering how many new people you’ve met on this journey. “The one in the city?”

“That’s the one. Want to check it out?”

You shrug, pulling him closer so you can lean on him. “Might as well.”

 

Cities are hell, you’re beginning to understand. It took you a few minutes – you wanted to be fair, get a taste for the inferno of noise and smells offending every sense you have left – but you’re fairly certain now. Steadily, voices rise in your ears – pounding until you’re deaf to anything else, barely even aware of thin breaths passing through your mouth. Asriel’s arm anchoring you, you’re pulled through it all like you’re going upstream against rapids, pulling and hooking round your legs to drag you under and into the storm.

You haven’t heard this many people (so many human, so many undoubtedly human, no matter what you try and pretend) since that day in the village square. Images fizzle into life through the blackness. You’re there now: cobbles scrape your knees, iron locked on your wrists, jeering voices rise to the sky in fear and hatred, and all you can feel is heat – hot tears in your eyes; burning white pain on your arms, your legs, the sides of your head; the heat of anger that burns through you, boiling, searing, roiling, rising, yearning to scorch everything to ash-

And softness. Cool brick. Muted sound. Tolerable, comfortable warmth around you. Relief as your lungs take in air.

“Are you okay?” Asriel asks, clearly knowing you’re not and knowing that you know he knows, but giving you the escape anyway. Not being an ungrateful person by nature, you take it.

“I’m fine.”

It’s embarrassing, first and foremost. You don’t even remember how you got into this probably-alleyway. All you know is that you’re here now, and Asriel’s pretty obviously shielding you from the street. And you managed to make a really quite exceptional fool out of yourself, not an hour after passing through the city gates. Frankly, you’re amazed. The idea of curling up on the almost-definitely-grubby, maybe-unspeakably-filthy alley stones is very attractive.

Asriel’s hand is on your shoulder before you can. “We can avoid the crowds?” he says in a semi-suggestion.

“That would be nice.”

Neither of you move. Slowly, very slowly, you take the chance to breathe properly and accustom yourself to everything around you. You wind your fingers around his on your shoulders, tilt your head up to find where his face should be (the angle imprinted into your body language, a height you’re sure you’ll never forget). Biting down the urge to know what his expression is, to reach out and feel it, you bare your teeth in a smile.

“Sorry. I’ll keep it under control.”

“You don’t have to. The ground’s pretty clean, you know,” he says conversationally, moving to your side and sitting down. You hesitate a moment and then join him, taking some of the pack’s weight on your crossed legs from where it lies on his. A silence builds up around you two, brick by brick, long enough for the few drops of sweat on the back of your neck to cool and dry.

If he’s giving you the chance, you’ll take it.

You can think about it now, of course. You can remember it all, see it all vividly in front of you and it doesn’t affect you in the slightest. A shudder goes skittering down your spine, okay, but that’s nothing. You should have handled it better, you know that. Replaying the memories, over and over, making sure that the only anger that bursts into life is dull and arid, you take your time.

Asriel waits for all of it. He doesn’t speak or try to touch you, and you hope it’s a sign that he’s not anxious about it anymore, that he just recognises what you need. And hell, maybe you’re being full of yourself: there’s every chance he’s met people like you before and this is nothing special for him. Whatever it is, he’s a quick learner, you’ll give him that. He hasn’t asked about your past at all.

Knowing that he won’t do it first, you reach over and find his hand, drawing idle circles on the pads of his palm, pushing the soft, leather-like skin every so often. You like doing it. You like moving along his fingers, twice the width of your own, and playing with the fine fur at the tips.

“Are you okay?” he asks again, same inflection.

“I’m fine,” you say again, and he believes you this time, going by his quick exhale that sings of a smile.

“Then let’s go find this witch!”

He keeps his arm around your shoulders as he leads you out into the street; your arm – with nowhere else to go – makes its way partway around his waist. The cacophony of noise is back, but you’re ready for it, and it doesn’t grow unnaturally loud in your ears this time. That doesn’t make it any less annoying, but you can handle a constant waterfall of different languages, different accents, different timbres and emotions and volumes assaulting your sensitive hearing. And then there’s Asriel, of course.

“Take a higher step here: there’s a loose paving stone. Just next to it is the opening of the gutters at the sides of the road, so be careful of that. There’s a carriage coming now – you can hear it, can’t you? It’s open-topped, carrying goods in the back, but the horses look well-kept and cared for, striding on proudly like the-”

“No similes in public.”

“…okay, that’s fair. I’m holding a grudge, but that’s fair.” He can barely keep the smile out of his voice, the embarrassing idiot. “Anyway, lots of carriages, lots of horses, lots of vaguely-horse-like monsters, keep off the road. All these buildings are ridiculously tall. I’d point out the similarities between them and uneven stacked stones in a wall, but at the risk of hurting your precious sensibilities,” –you elbow him- “I’ll just say they seriously look like they’re going to fall over. You can barely see the sky: it’s just a strip of cloud right above us, towering buildings blocking it all out. I’ve never seen so many variations of dirty brown and grey.”

With his constant commentary, you slowly make your way through the city. You manage to get lost twice, but while Asriel seems to take this as a direct affront on his honour, you don’t really care. The air is thick in places – with smells, but also smoke and steam and heat – and it helps you remember where you are. The remnants of memories from the episode fade back to what you’re used to.

And it’s okay. It’s really okay: Asriel’s with you and he hasn’t given up on you yet (against all reason, but he’s weird like that). You’re not in the past anymore. You’re not a child anymore. You’re going to fix things, wipe away everything with your death so you won’t have to remember it anymore.

Wait. Was that always the reason?

Dragging it back like faded, moth-eaten cloth, falling to pieces in your hands, you try and remember. It’s a mess of pillars and principles standing useless in the ruins of what used to be resolve. You have to finish the job, because that’s what you wanted. Because that’s redemption. Because that’s the only way to make up for your existence. Because…because that’s what they wanted for you.

You think.

The uncertainty unnerves you and you throw it away, forcing yourself to let it go. You don’t have to worry if things have gotten a little confused. Not yet, anyway. You have a goal now: you’re going to go on with this journey and see it to its end before doing anything. That’s the _point_. That’s why you’re here: to give Asriel his adventure.

Right?

“You okay?” His voice is there now – not the thrum of running description, and you turn to him.

“I’m fine. Sorry, I was just distracted.”

“No, no, it’s fine! I was just saying: I think we’re on the right street now. It’s…it’s kind of a mess,” he laughs. “There isn’t even any sky down here. I think we’re in the lower part of the city, it’s definitely dirty enough. There’s barely anyone around, so it’s just a tunnel of buildings and shadows, pipes rusting and patches of broken plaster and really unconvincing paint jobs. Speaking of unconvincing, I don’t like the look of the section above us right now, so let’s go a bit faster.”

There are puddles almost everywhere you step and you hope viciously that’s it’s just water. Thankfully, the smell here isn’t too bad, just thick and heavy so you almost have trouble breathing as Asriel moves you both quicker. Something catches your attention: the sounds of muffled footsteps somewhere behind you. They echo in the tunnel of disjoined, patchwork buildings.

“Don’t turn around,” Asriel says, very low.

You walk faster to please him, pretending adrenaline isn’t itching at your fingers with the need to work out some of the frustration at your own confusion and weakness.

After maybe a minute, the two of you turn quickly to the side, and then Asriel’s knocking furiously at a door that doesn’t sound like it’ll stand up to it. The footsteps are closer now, splashing behind you.

Luckily, someone gets to the door before it can break. “Yes?” he drawls. “Oh my, you do look in a right state, don’t you?”

“Uh…yes. Um. Does someone called Alphys live here?”

“She does.” There’s a slight whirring sound as he leans against the door, but your attention is held quite firmly by the footsteps approaching from the other end of the street so you don’t pay it any mind.

“Could we see her, _please_?”

“Oh darling, you see, I’d just love to let you in and all, but she’s the tiniest bit busy right now.”

“We can wait.”

“My mistake: she’s rather a lot busy. Terribly busy, horribly busy, hideously busy, that sort of thing, you know.”

“We really don’t mind waiting!”

He sighs and you can practically hear him pouting. “Look, sweetheart, I-”

“Mettaton, for fuck’s sake just let them in!” comes a strangled voice from inside.

“Well.” The so-named Mettaton sounds a little more than put out, verging more on vengeful. “It seems you’d best come in, then.”

Asriel pushes you through the door and closes it firmly behind the two of you, just as heavy steps come down a staircase.

“God!” a woman says rather squeakily, clearly not directed at you. “I’ve _told_ you about turning customers away just so I can fix your legs!”

“Well, if you had your priorities straight maybe I wouldn’t have to set them for you,” Mettaton replies sulkily.

“You’re unbelievable!” At this point she seems to remember that there are other people in the room and squeaks accordingly, her voice immediately going frail. “O-oh, I’m really sorry about that! He’s just, um, like that, sometimes. So, uh…can I help you with something?”

You can feel Asriel turn to you, waiting to see if you’ll speak, and you can’t very well let him down. “He’s Asriel, I’m Chara. We were hoping you could help me with a curse.” You point to the flowers. They’re still healthy and in full bloom, so much so that you’ve had more than one unpleasant encounter with bees (and several more pleasant ones with butterflies).

“Gosh. Um. Yikes.” She pads closer to you, her feet hitting the tiles of the floor oddly, and you freeze up a little, but not too much. Progress. “I’ve never actually done a curse before…”

“No, we thought as much.” You have yet to meet a witch who could summon up even the slightest bit of confidence around curses.

Asriel speaks up, his arm tighter around your shoulders as if he thinks you need comforting. “We were told you had a way with machinery, and by now we’ve pretty much tried regular magic of every imaginable sort, so…if you could give it a try, at least, we’d be grateful.”

Mettaton scoffs from the corner of the room. “You might as well just try a hacksaw, you know.”

“You think?” The woman scuttles off before Asriel’s splutters of protest can reach her. There are several more whirrs and an odd ticking sound which you finally identify as belonging to Mettaton as he comes closer to you.

“Seeing as you _must_ interrupt all work on my body,” he says tragically, “you really might as well come upstairs, at least. I’m certainly not going to stay in this draughty old place. No style at all,” he sniffs, and then you’re both following him up the stairs.

“We’re- oh _wow_ ,” Asriel says lowly in his description voice. “Uh, we’re in a huge room, arching ceiling, white everywhere…it doesn’t even look like it should fit…”

You’re just grateful that the air’s opened up: you can breathe freely here, even if there is an odd smell around the place. Something that smells like lamp-oil, and sawdust perhaps. You’re not given the time to make sure, because then the witch – Alphys – is back, presumably with a hacksaw. Asriel gently prods you to a chair.

“So, um,” Alphys says in front of you, “I figured Mettaton was being silly, but I still think shears might be a good place to start. Right? These are reinforced, so, um, they might work better than what you’ve tried before? Um. Would you like to do it? I mean, I’d probably not want a stranger going near _my_ face with sharp objects, so…”

“Yeah, I’ll do it,” Asriel volunteers with a little too much finality for you to be entirely comfortable. He could at least _try_ not to be embarrassing and baby you in public. Not that you’d particularly wanted her going at the vines (not that you particularly wanted _anyone_ cutting them off in close proximity to your eyes), but really.

You’re fairly sure Alphys is still nearby, breathing tensely, but then Asriel’s right in front of you, his fingers brushing over your cheekbones as cold metal touches the bridge of your nose. You’d shiver, but you can feel his hands trembling too, and a violent face injury isn’t quite what you had in mind for your day, so you force yourself to stay still. He gives it a few tries: tentative at first, and then with more and more force, and it’s only when the metal screeches and chips break off that he stops. Your face feels cold when he moves back.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” he says apologetically.

“I guess not!” An awkward laugh. “Um, I think I can try and fix something stronger up? Something specifically for curses, I mean. I’m…I’m not really a witch, though…I have some power, but it’s really not much.” A self-deprecating laugh. “I’m surprised anyone even recommended me to you!”

Asriel’s there in a flash to reassure her, leaving you to rub the vines around your eyes. They’re not even scratched. “Well, Undyne seemed to have faith in you, so I’m sure you’re really very good! This is just a difficult curse, we think.”

“W-wait, _Undyne_ said…?”

“Yes? She said we should go to you if we wanted to get anything done.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god? Ohhh my god…”

Somewhere across the room, Mettaton’s laughing richly. “Looks like you’re going to have to do her proud, darling!”

“Shut up!” Alphys says in a choked voice, and then she turns back to you. “Um! Okay, I can try! I think…if I tighten the regulator and set the hairspring in resonance with a simple charm…” Muttering plans to herself, she goes off to the other side of the room and presently you hear vibrations and the screams of worked metal. Asriel sits down heavily next to you.

“Are you alright?” you ask before he has the chance to ask you, as he inevitably would have.

“A little on edge. Golly, I did _not_ like the look of those people following us.”

“Do you think they’ll still be there later?”

“I doubt it.”

Nodding as if you can’t hear the worry in his voice, you sink a little more into the chair. Your legs feel like they’ve set in place, as they always do after a day of walking. There’s dry sweat all down your back and you know your hair’s a mess, even allowing for the flowers. All things considered, you don’t feel too bad. What with how your episodes usually end, things could have been far worse than they are. What a surprisingly pleasant turn of events, for you (disregarding your unsettling loss of resolve, but you decide not to think about that just now).

Mettaton takes a seat next to you and there are a great many whirring and clanking sounds. For a brief moment, you wonder if your good mood will let you strike up a conversation, but of course Asriel gets there first.

“I’m sorry if this is rude, but are you a monster?”

“Oh heavens no,” he says without any real injury in his voice. Mostly pride, actually. “Goodness, what a thought. No, darling, I’m an automaton. Clockwork, of course: Alphys there is the leading figure in clockwork research, you see. I’m her magnum opus.”

Asriel claps appreciatively and you can almost feel the smugness seeping off Mettaton. “Well, I _would_ be, anyway,” he continues, shouting to where you suppose Alphys is, “if she ever finished my body!”

“I have re-designed your legs five times! I honestly don’t know what you’re expecting from me at this point!” comes the ruffled reply.

 “Do you mind if I describe you to Chara?” There he goes, being embarrassing again.

Mettaton claps his hands together, wood knocking hollowly. “Darling, it would be my honour! Be nice.”

So Asriel turns to you, slightly, putting his hand on the edge of your chair so you can play with the pads (well, he might not have meant it for that, but that’s what you’re going to do), and you relax while listening to him.

He’s just got to describing the polished wood torso (‘Note the sheen,’ Mettaton adds helpfully, in perhaps his tenth interruption) when Alphys comes over. She and Mettaton bicker back and forth for a minute before he begrudgingly gets off the chair and lets her dump a hefty piece of machinery on it, making the springs groan in protest.

“Right! I, um, I think I might have got somewhere with this! I’m going to have to put a sort of ring around the flowers and it might, ah, sting a bit. Maybe. I’ve never actually done anything like this before…um, but is that okay?”

“It’s fine,” you say, as much to reassure Asriel (and maybe yourself) as her. “Please do.”

“Well, uh. Here we go!”

She slips the ring over your head and locks it into place with some twisting. The weight isn’t anything crippling: you just have to balance things a little differently, but then there’s a mighty clicking from the machine next to you and something starts whirring manically, and suddenly your head is full of stars.

It’s like seed pods popping through your ears and all around your skull, filling the darkness with flashes of light without any way to avoid them. You think a whimper escapes your mouth but you choose to believe it doesn’t. Nothing breaks through the popping and sparking: no sound, no smell, only Asriel’s hand in yours and the hard back of the chair to remind you that you still have some sort of physical existence. There are only the irregular, mindless explosions contained within you, and you ride it out because there’s nothing else to do.

When the machine shudders to a stop, you whine in relief.

Alphys pulls it off your head and without waiting a second, Asriel’s hands are on your cheeks, pulling your face to look at him. You can’t see him, so it didn’t work.

“Oh gosh, Chara, are you okay? That looked horrible!”

“A-ah, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I should have realised this would happen, I’m sorry!”

You shake your head to make both of them stop.

“I’m fine. Thank you for trying.”

The flurry of worry keeps on around you against your best efforts until Mettaton strides over with a sigh that could move mountains. “Oh, come _on_. They said they were fine, didn’t they? Goodness, as if you didn’t have enough to do already without all this fuss. Now come on darling, let’s get you back to the drawing board.”

After a quick ruffle of your hair, he pushes Alphys away.

 

You have to suffer through two more attempts before you’re all ready to admit that it might be a lost cause. Alphys and Asriel exchange apologies back and forth like a pendulum and you suspect they’d have been at it all night if Mettaton hadn’t made several pointed comments about baths and ‘food before the three of you collapse, how awful it must be to rely on flesh bodies, _really_ ’.

So you go through the rhythms of it all. You take the bath first, scrubbing your hair and body and flowers of the sweat and grime of almost a week’s worth of walking (baths having been the last thing on your mind that night with the jaded ex-witch). You take the new clothes offered to you, somehow managing to get in them without help (though of course Asriel finds the need to adjust them afterwards before you shove him off to wash too). You eat, listen to the others chat and argue, and you let yourself be pushed to a makeshift bed on the floor of the main room when they’re finally finished talking about machinery and crushes and a hundred other topics you barely listen to.

It all feels hollow, somehow.

This final attempt didn’t work, so it’s like you’re supposed to end it now. Isn’t this a good cut-off point? You’re not really all that disappointed you still can’t see, you’re just…reluctant. You feel like a coward. All this time clutching the assumption that you would keep your promise and end things, and now you’re running from every opportunity. You’re _supposed_ to do it. You’re supposed to take responsibility and end your life. This should have been nothing more than a quick diversion to humour a stranger, ending in a nice farewell before you go to kill yourself, succeeding this time.

You don’t know if that’s what you want anymore.

That’s troubling. You have to want it. It’s the only way to redeem yourself: that’s what you’ve been saying, and it’s as true as it ever was. It’s all so simple. You’ve known the outcome for years: no matter your momentary weaknesses, you always knew what you had to do. But you just don’t think your heart’s in it anymore.

In the quiet of night – only the constant hum and ticking of clockwork around you – you turn onto your side and reach out a hand to the edge of Asriel’s sleeping roll. You can’t quite reach, leaving your fingers trailing over cold tiles.

Is it enough to want to keep going? Is that a good enough reason to ignore the self-styled debt you have, racked up against a life you never asked for? You have principles to stick to, you have things you have to do. You’re not sure you can throw them away so easily.

If it had all been based on give and take, payment and debt, then it might be easier to let it fall away like snow off the branches of a shaken tree and forget about it. But you wanted it to end when you reached for the buttercups, and it’s like you’re betraying your past self by not finishing it. You had nothing, less than nothing. Not even a chance to build anything up from the ground. They made sure of that. You’re a humiliation: they were being kind by giving you work, by keeping you, when you were only a filthy _changeling_.

So they said.

So everyone said.

So it makes sense, then, that you should have nothing without them. The fey never came for you (you’d never thought they would, nobody thought that), so it’s natural that you should do what everyone wanted for you and end your life. Even without them around you, that knowledge is branded into you. Because that’s how the story ends: the beast dies, the village goes free, everyone’s happy.

You stretch your arm until the joints hurt, pushing yourself close enough to feel his fur between your fingers. Burning tears sting your useless eyes, trailing down your cheeks.

You’re such a _coward_.

 

Morning comes unceremoniously as Alphys turns on the lights to the main room (waking Asriel) and immediately screeches apologies (waking you) for forgetting you were there. Groggily, you push yourself up and yawn while Asriel sleepily assures Alphys that it’s fine, you’re intruding on her hospitality enough as it is, she’s being a wonderful hostess, the usual stuff. There’s a sour taste in your mouth, both figuratively and literally, so you leave them to it while you go to fumble around for your clothes.

The two of you leave them late in the morning. It’s not exactly ideal, but Alphys wanted to try out a new idea she’d had (it felt like a set of coils and cogs wrapped around your head, and turned out to be just as useless). So after a hurried breakfast and the entertainment of Alphys trying to get Mettaton to stop lounging on every existing table or vaguely flat surface, you’re back to the streets.

You keep your mouth firmly shut, praying that Asriel won’t say what you’re terrified he will.

For a long time, though, he just reassures you that the neighbourhood you’re in looks a lot nicer when there are actually people around, even with the lack of sunlight. You take his word for it: it just sounds like normal crowds to you, with the same heavy smell floating through the air wherever you go.

His distracted descriptions are nowhere near enough to keep you from thinking about the future. With every step you take, the sense of an impending end grows on you, eating into you. The worries of last night have congealed by now but they haven’t gone away: you didn’t think they would. You knew this was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier. And sure, maybe you can keep going. He hasn’t said anything about it, so maybe he wants that too. Maybe you can keep walking the country until his money runs out and you have to go back to his parents. Maybe you can keep hanging onto this frail hope that there’s actually a way to break the curse. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but you’re not sure you can be that much of an optimist.

It’s so much easier to cut things away early, and you’ve already missed ‘early’ at this point.

“Uh…Chara? Are you listening?” Asriel’s grip on your arm gets a little stronger.

“I am now.”

“Glad to have you back with us,” he says dryly and you resist the urge to elbow him for it. “I was just saying, I want to go and stock up on supplies again, since we’re here and all, so would you mind waiting for me?”

“Waiting?”

“Yeah: the high street is bound to be pretty much the most crowded place in the whole city. I’m not going to make you go there, come on, what do you take me for? There’s a temple just here: you’ll probably be okay in the gardens, right?”

Struck by the prospect of embarrassing him in public again, you nod quickly.

“Good.” He’s smiling. “Um…I really hope you won’t need it, but there aren’t exactly a lot of people here, so if anything happens…”

He stops to rummage around in the pack and presses a small sheathed knife into your hands. You almost can’t believe it, have to unsheathe it and feel the blade before you understand. It’s been a long, long time since anyone let you have a weapon.

“I mean, it’s broad daylight,” Asriel goes on, “so I don’t think anyone would try anything _anyway_ , but…”

You nod, understanding what he means. So he leads you to a bench, neatly describes your immediate surroundings, and with just a too-long squeeze of your hand, is gone.

It’s the strangest thing.

Tipping your head back to feel the breeze ruffle your flowers and fringe, gently cooling the slight hints of sweat on your forehead, you breathe out. There’s a creamy, sweet smell, quite unlike what you’ve come to know from the city. You reach a hand out to feel a bush beside you, bursts of what feel like tiny flowers popping out from between the thick leaves. The smell’s on your fingers when you bring your hand back. So there are pleasant things here after all.

Your thoughts quickly turn back to thorns.

The two of you have barely been separated this past month, not even to the point of being in different houses. You almost forgot what it is, to not have him with you. And throughout all your panic, all your constricting, contrary wishes, you hadn’t thought of him, not really. Is this what it’s going to be like? He won’t be with you towards the end. It’ll just be you, (probably) flowers and all. If you flatter yourself, you might even think he’d grieve your absence.

You’re going to have to leave him.

Is nothing about this allowed to be easy? You were under the impression that doing the right thing was supposed to have some perks. There’s only one here and you’re not even sure you want it.

You scrape your shoes in the dirt under the bench, running your fingers over the shape of the knife in your pocket. How are you supposed to break it to him? Just tell him you need to split up, that you’re tired of this? He’ll never accept that. He’d just offer to go with you to help guide you. You think. Is it arrogant to think he’d do that? Maybe it is. Maybe he wouldn’t care at all: maybe he’s bored of you and you just haven’t been able to tell because you can’t see his face. Maybe he’ll be the one to gently push you away (you can’t imagine him doing it if it’s not gentle), tell you he needs to get back to help his parents, that you should go your separate ways. Maybe he’ll just spend weeks hinting that you should leave, wishing you’d go.

Or maybe you’re doing him a disservice by even imagining that.

Stuck between the intolerable idea of thinking too much of yourself and the equally intolerable idea of thinking too little of him, you’re not sure where you stand.

And you do have to leave. Don’t you? It’s only going to get worse. You know you’re only going to want to stay with him more and more.

Before you can think too far along that path, something brings you back to the world around you. Footsteps. Until now, the street around the temple was quiet apart from the muffled sounds from streets further away, but now you can hear people coming. You sit up a little straighter, listen a little harder.

You’re not so naïve that you think you could recognise people by their footsteps, and maybe it’s just a coincidence that these echo the same in this street as the ones from last night did, but you could swear…the same slight squeak of old leather on one, the same hollow ring of metal on the other. An opportunity you’re not sure you have the control to ignore again.

You sit up proudly, daring them to come to you, muscles itching for a fight. You know you’re at a disadvantage – even supposing you can fight blind, you’re sorely out of practice – but you’ve been at worse in the past. At least there are only two of them; at least you’re not tied up or near-hobbled. It doesn’t matter anyway: you just want to feel like there’s something you can _do_ , something that isn’t whining and pretending the end isn’t near. Violence fits the bill well enough.

The thick smell of flowers filters away into a thin breeze as they near you. They’re whispering something: it takes you a second to adjust and catch that they’re disappointed you don’t have the pack, you’re not worth their time. You catch insults, too, words that have your blood roaring for theirs.

When they turn to go, you get up, hands in your pockets, and the words are out of your mouth before you can remind yourself that this is an awful idea. “You’re really going to leave me hanging like that?”

The skid of their boots stopping. “The fuck is it to you?”

“Seems like it’s my business if you’re planning on robbing us. Just a warning: go pick on some other country saps if you’re looking for easy money.”

They jeer at you to each other: you’re a cocky bitch, a freak who doesn’t know when to hold her fucking tongue. It’s been so long: you’d almost forgotten what it felt like, to not be respected at any level.

“Don’t you _dare_ call me bitch again, you inept, syphilitic sacks of shit,” you spit.

“What did you just say?” A challenge, not a question, and you rise to it, repeating yourself with precisely cut syllables. They’re onto you almost before you can move.

Almost.

You hop back around the bench, praying Asriel hadn’t left out anything in his brief description of the ground because you’re utterly lost. The knife is unsheathed and in your hand like it’s always belonged there. With no chance at finesse or intelligence, you use brute force and lunge at them, catching one with the knife – as you feel it hit flesh, you dig in, twisting your hand until the woman is roaring in pain and then even further before you leap backwards. Only the smallest disturbance in the air and the slightest rustles of clothing warn you to duck down as the other reaches for you, and you get him in the leg next, through the boards of the bench. There’s no room to push it deeper so you have to pull it out, looking up in time for a fist to connect with your jaw.

You’re sent back, falling into the hard stone of a wall that makes the back of your head burst into white, more so than the pain of your jawbone. But you’re not new to this: you feign for a second, then reach out with the knife, wincing at the effort, as one of them comes towards you. It barely scratches them.

This time it’s a boot in your ribs, and then the knife is grabbed from you while you’re winded. A hand pulls your head up by your hair and they knee you in the face, swearing when the flowers prove more trouble than they’d counted on. You smile at that – finally the iron-like vines are worth something – but you’re punched again for it.

It takes almost more determination than you have, but you lunge for the legs of the person in front of you, pulling them down and kicking them as they go: calves, thighs, and firmly in their crotch, taking satisfaction in the howls of pain. Anticipating the other attacker, you fall to the side, but their hand is on your arm, pinning you to the wall, and then there’s metal at your throat.

“Not another fucking move,” the woman says, breathing heavily.

With equally laboured breath, you stay very still. You knew this would happen. Not that it would be quite so humiliating, but you knew this would happen. You’d have been the most self-confident of idiots to think it wouldn’t. And maybe things are better like this: no hard choices, no strung-out partings, just the cold anger of strangers.

But you really, really don’t want to die like this.

You consider spitting in her face, discard the idea as beyond foolish, and just wait for her next move. At least you feel calm now. There’s none of the frustration going rancid in your chest like there was before. Well done: you managed possibly the stupidest imaginable method of distracting yourself from your problems. Somehow you’re not even surprised. There’s just emptiness.

The blade presses harder into your neck, a sliver of cold against your flushed skin.

“Listen you feral bitch, if y-”

She’s cut off by a snarl, deep and bestial and ragged with rage, and then the knife falls into your lap as she’s thrust to the side. There’s a struggle, there are sounds of pain, and through it all there are growls rumbling in your ears. Finally, there’s a pause punctuated by heavy breathing, the smell of blood still rich in the air.

“Go,” Asriel says, lower and deeper than you’ve ever heard him. They do, slowly, spitting curses your way, and then he’s kneeling in front of you, holding your face, spilling apologies like he’s made of them.

“Chara, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I never thought anyone would actually attack you, I’d never have left you alone if I thought that! I’m sorry, you’re so _hurt_ , oh god, you’re…” He wipes away the thin trail of blood at the corner of your lips, and then he’s hugging you to him like he’s scared he’ll break you. Like he’d care if he did. Like you matter to him.

You can’t believe you ever thought he’d want you gone.

“I’m so sorry! I’ll get you to a healer, I’ll fix it all, I’ll make it all better, I promise! I’ll never let anyone hurt you again, I’ll never let anyone _touch_ you!”

Your fingers clutch at the back of his shirt, creasing it. Everything’s warm, soft, _him_ , and it’s everything you don’t want to let go of. You can feel the spike of tears again, taunting you. You’re a coward, you’re weak, you’re useless, you’re an idiot, you really do deserve to die, you’re leeching off everything that’s good about him, you could never in a thousand lifetimes be worthy of him: your thoughts float and mix with the pain aching throughout your body, poison to drag you down deeper, but there are three things that stay solid and sure amongst them all.

Firstly, no matter what you wanted in the past, no matter what you are or what you feel you owe the world for being born, you don’t want to leave.

Secondly, regardless of everything you believed you were capable of, you think you love him.

Thirdly, because of all of that and more – everything he’s done for you, everything he’s shown you, the piercing terror that he’ll reject you – you don’t think you’ll ever be able to tell him the truth about why he found you in that buttercup patch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not featured: the dinner scene where they drink a lot and whine about their crushes while being completely transparent about who they're crushing on (Chara's brooding too much to notice, MTT and Alphys just judge silently)


	5. The Small Witch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, heavy warnings for suicide idealisation and frank discussion of suicide (also dependent relationships and past trauma)

For all that you’re now aware you probably love the idiot, your relationship with Asriel doesn’t change all that much on the surface. Still dripping with apologies, he cleans you up and carries your aching body to the nearest healer. For a price higher than anyone would have spent on you in a year, he gets you presentable and not hurting with every step, and then the two of you leave the city.

Your arms still ache (well, your whole body does, but that’s your fault) so the two of you hold hands instead of linking arms like usual. Neither of you speaks much. The sounds of the city fade into the air behind you and you don’t feel so much like you’re drowning. Beds and basic conveniences may be nice, but fresh air in your lungs and peace in your ears are nicer.

But while your relationship doesn’t change superficially, your mind is set abuzz with bluebottles of thoughts, dancing prettily and driving you to distraction.

You savour things: for every sensation that isn’t totally disagreeable, you ask yourself ‘Could I give this up?’ For redemption and a hungry abyss, could you? It’s a strange question. On one hand, there’s nothing that seems reason enough to hold you back. On the other, everything does: a hundred thousand thorns scraping you and pulling you away.

It’s all a moot point, anyway. You can’t do it, not while things are the way they are. You know that now. It’s just something to keep your mind off the rest of it, because thinking about your death is familiar enough to be comforting.

The day passes into the coldness of night and the two of you settle down in a site Asriel picks out for you. You’re feeling generous (not fragile: _generous_ ), so you let him spread out your bedroll for you, let him get the food and water and all the rest of the routine. He barely speaks, but he’s always there: holding your hand, steering you in the right direction, making conspicuous noise if you need to know he’s around.

With his feather-soft breath calm in the night filled with insect cries, you ask yourself what there is to do now. Can you really go on like this?

It would have been better if you hadn’t realised how much he meant to you. You can’t allow yourself to inflict your pathetic problems onto him, not now you know, not now there’s no convenient end to this game, not now you have to face the idea of him growing bored of you and a million other ways he could hurt you. It’s frightening.

There’s a whole future stretched out in front of you blankly, and you can’t keep up with this fool’s errand, no matter how much you want to.

In the morning, you’ve had enough of being a coward.

“What’s going to happen now?”

The air’s still humid and frosty around you – autumn pulling in, sucking the sun out of the late summer – and you can feel it when he moves closer to you: his heat is still unforgettable.

“What do you want to do?”

Swallowing, you force yourself to tell the truth. A small truth, not the ones you hoard selfishly to yourself. “I don’t want you to spend too much effort on this. If it’s just a waste of time, I’d prefer we didn’t. I won’t keep going if I’m keeping you from your life in doing so.”

“You’re not.”

“Are you even thinking about this? We’ve been to so many witches, and none of them had any idea what to do, Asriel: how can y-”

“I have thought about it.” His voice is calm, comforting, most likely on purpose. “You’re not wasting my life, not at all! If it takes us another month, another five, another year, I don’t care. It’s okay: we can just keep looking. We’ve got money, we’ve got time, we’ve got everything: there’s no reason we need to stop just yet. If it comes to it, we can even cross the border and see the witches there, see if they’ve got more experience with curses. We don’t have to give up just because we’ve been to all of the ones on the list.”

You’re not used to this: he’s so certain. How is your weak resolve supposed to stand against that? You don’t want to stop either, but your fear is palpable. It’s intolerable to you to weight him down, just as intolerable as the idea of him rejecting you like everyone has before. Relationships do not last when you’re involved.

Doing your best aggravated growl, you say, “You don’t get it at all. I can…I can pay back the money, eventually,” –you can’t, but that’s not for him to know now– “but I can’t give you back this time.”

“I’m not asking you to!”

He’s clearly not making any effort to understand you, so you pepper your words with as much emphasis as you can. “I cannot, in good conscience, keep letting you do this.”

Beside you, his breathing goes funny for a second. “One more,” he says.

“Huh?”

“One more witch. I heard, uh, rumours in the city. Talk of a witch a day or so from here. Maybe just a day now. You can put up with that, right? Just…one more, please. Just a day more. Please.”

It doesn’t make any sense to you, but you nod hollowly anyway. A hundred days more would be too few, but that’s because you’re selfish. You can’t keep doing this to the person you love. Honestly, you’re just not sure what you want to do at all: suddenly having a future is a terrible thing. Imagining it with someone else is a far more terrifying one.

For a long time, Asriel is unnaturally silent. He’ll warn you when you need to move, but there are no descriptions, no conversation, and you don’t press it. You can tell a certain amount from the wind, the smells, the bird calls, anyway. But hell, you just feel so lost. This wasn’t supposed to happen. None of it was: that’s the _point_. You don’t know what the fuck you’re supposed to do now everything’s been twisted to the point of unrecognizability and everything you were sure of is battling with the scared little ‘I want’s and ‘It would be nice if’s that float through your mind. Clearly you’re not supposed to be happy if you can’t even handle this, if you feel the need to push away the best thing to ever happen to you just because you’re scared of being a burden on him and petrified of being rejected. You’re a mess – you’re an absolute wreck. You’re so scared: of him, of this, of the future, of him seeing how you couldn’t redeem your pathetic life with death.

The day goes by slowly.

“We’re, uh, we’re coming up to the woods,” Asriel says at one point, crashing into your steadily devolving thoughts. He has to cough to clear his voice from disuse.

“You think it’s through here?”

“Yeah, that’s what the rumours all said. There can’t be that many giant woods around this distance from the city. But, um, it’s kind of late: I think we should settle down for the night and go in the morning. The sun’s already setting, and who knows how long it’s going to take us to find them in there?”

“I’d prefer to keep going.”

He makes a choked sound. “It’s…it’s just a night, Chara. It’d be good to rest.”

As if you could sleep: you’re not sure you’ve ever been more restless. “I know,” you say, and keep walking. He walks with you rather than let go of your hand.

“Chara, stop, please! It’s getting dark: it’d really be better if we just leave it until tomorrow!”

But waiting makes it harder and it’s already hard enough. How like you to want something this badly but ruin and run away from it all because you’re scared of it collapsing without your say-so. If you were a more intelligent person, you know you would have made the best of your last day with him instead, but you’re an idiot.

The sooner you can be miserably alone rather than tied to stupid, pointless hopes, the better.

“Chara, please!” He’s still protesting, his voice thick and strange. “Why are you in such a hurry? It’s dark: I’ll never be able to find my way around once the sun’s set. We shouldn’t be doing this! Why won’t you just listen?! Do you _want_ to leave m- _watch out_!”

Before you can react, his arms are around your waist, lifting you into the air like you’re nothing – like you’re everything, to him – and putting you down gently on the road again. You’d look at him incredulously, but there’s no point in it so you wait for the explanation.

“There’s a slope, covered in nettles…” he trails off, sounding more than a little admonished.

“Thank you.” You probably sound admonished, too.

“We…we should…”

“Just take me through the woods. Please.”

There’s a sigh that flutters his voice, a deep breath, and then he says, “Okay,” as stiffly as you’ve ever heard him. Your hand in his, he leads you on, and you’re struck with the need to tell him everything – spurred by the intoxicating hope that, somehow, it will all be okay if you do – but you don’t. You know perfectly well that would only make it all the more difficult.

It’s already difficult.

Packed dirt becomes soft grass and soil under your boots and you begin to feel the tickle of leaves against your legs as the acoustics change around you. Bark scrapes against your hand occasionally; the damp smells of earth and moss choke your nose pleasantly; drops of rainwater left over from the afternoon’s drizzle hit the back of your neck, fallen from leaves far above you. You keep your head hanging low despite it, because you feel the absurd urge to cry.

If you weren’t the way you were…

If he wasn’t the way he is…

If you weren’t inherently awful, sure. You’re so pathetic. You’re not even holding back solely because of your stupid, fucked-up principles, are you? You’re just scared.

“Are you cold?” he asks. It’s a fair question: the wind’s picked up, and while the trees are packed thick enough that you don’t feel it that much, the temperature’s still dropped.

“I’ve got you, haven’t I? I’m fine.”

There’s something almost like his usual pleased exhale, and it twists your chest until you find it hard to breathe. Because he’s not likely to complain (he hasn’t so far), you lean your shoulder against his arm, bury your face in it and breathe him in. It’s difficult to walk but it doesn’t matter to you.

“Are…are you okay?” His voice is strangled in its attempt to be soft.

“I’m fine. You can’t see any sign of the witch?”

“No…I’ve been looking, but it’s just dark forest. I don’t- oh.”

“What?”

“There’s…” you can hear he’s smiling, and he wraps an arm around you to pull you onwards. “They’re lighting the way. Everything’s dark, barely visible, all rising shadows and gloom, and then there’s…them. I don’t know what they are: I think they’re a type of fey I’ve never met before. They’re like…golden lights around us. No fixed form, just rippling between shapes: flowers and fish and birds and butterflies, lining the way and painting everything in this golden mist.” He sounds enchanted.

“They’re not will o’ the wisps, are they?”

“No, I’ve met those, I’d know _them_ again. I think it’s safe.”

So he says, and you’ve done worse than trust him in the past. And you can feel warmth around you now: little sparks and flushes of heat moving towards and away from you, all over the place. Even the dank air feels like it’s clearing as you push on through the forest. For a few quiet minutes, it feels good. Like this could work. It’s worked for a month: it could work more. He might be…receptive, maybe. He doesn’t want you gone right away, anyway.

So you let yourself think what you didn’t want to because you’re too scared of being tempted: what if you just took what you can get? A few weeks, a few months, before he gets bored or before he finds out what you are or before you crack under the impossibility of it all. Open yourself up for once, see if it’s worth it.

You might as well go back and kill yourself now, save yourself the heartbreak.

Actually, isn’t that funny? Heartbreak. Who ever thought you’d be scared of suffering from _that_? If the people you grew up around knew, they’d be laughing. Nastily, mockingly, yes, but laughing. It’s so ridiculous.

“You’ve been really out of it today,” Asriel comments.

It takes you a second to reply. “Sorry.”

“Is something on your mind? Or…I mean, are you just impatient to get it over with?” A shaking voice, a scared voice. You cling tighter to him because it’s something you can give freer than words.

“I’m just thinking.”

“Oh.” He lapses into a silence you might call thoughtful. From somewhere in front of you, there’s the faint, light sound of bells. It grows louder with every step, joined by the subtlest smell of flowers you couldn’t possibly place: a perfume with a tang wrapped in mellowness.

“Chara, yesterday…the, um, attack. Did it remind you of your past?”

Your fingers dig into his arm a little, but there’s no helping that. “Yes,” you say tightly.

“Oh.” It’s barely a breath: a choke, perhaps.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“How can I _not_?” he pleads, the rawness biting through you. “You won’t tell me anything, and that’s fine! It’s your past: I’m not going to force you, but…but when you freeze up any time I mention it by mistake, when you won’t go into human villages, when you reacted the way you did at the city, when you tell me that that assault reminds you of your past, I…!” He sucks a breath through his teeth and says, calmer, “How am I supposed to not worry about that?”

“But it doesn’t concern you,” you point out, fighting the uncomfortable heat in your cheeks. “You don’t need to worry about it at all. It’s over.”

“It still affects you.”

“Of course it does: it’s my past.”

“Then it’s not over. No, Chara, don’t, I know…I know I’m not going to get it. I know, but…do you not think that it might help to talk to someone about it? I don’t want to push you, but…just talk to me? If this is the last night, don’t you think you could? I know you’ve been thinking about a lot and I’m _trying_ to second-guess you, I’m trying to work out what’s going through your mind but I’m so lost, Chara! I’ve got no idea, I’m sorry. But I want to know you so badly that it hurts, sometimes.”

You’re not sure you’re breathing. You want to laugh, to run, but you settle for stiffening up and walking like a third-rate mechanical doll. How dare he stoke the hopes locked up inside you: how are you supposed to _reply_ to that?!

Asriel laughs miserably. “It’s too late, isn’t it? You want this to be the last one, right? So I guess I should have asked before. Sorry.”

It’s terrifying. It’s harrowing. Your tongue is so heavy in your mouth that you couldn’t move it even if you knew what to say.

As if he doesn’t know you at all, Asriel doesn’t wait. “We’re coming up to the cottage,” he says brightly, and just like that, you’re lost.

You’ve never done this before, you’ve never had to do this before and it’s too much on top of everything else. Does the world just expect you to know how to do this when you’re so confused by what you want already?! But he’s leading you to the cottage, and for all you know the witch is already watching you, and it’s _so scary_ , you don’t know what to do. But you can’t leave him thinking you don’t want him, can you? You need to speak: he deserves more than that, he deserves everything you have but he doesn’t deserve to suffer your company! But what if it’s not suffering for him, what if you’re worth something to him – you know you are, you’ve felt it, but you can’t _say_ that – what if this is the worst mistake you’re ever going to make because you’re an idiot who thought their _stupid_ principles and _stupid_ self-hatred and _stupid_ pride were worth more than this? You’re so stupid, all you can feel is laughter: raucous and grating and painful but it’s _so_ funny: you hate yourself, you hate yourself, you hate yourself-

Soft hands hold yours, and the gale dies.

It’s skin on skin, the crackle of a fire, the smell of cooking. Air rushes to your lungs and you drink it in to the rhythm the hands set as they squeeze yours.

“Are you alright?” asks a small, croaky voice, almost drowned out by Asriel asking the same.

You’re not. You’ve fucked everything up again. You can’t even handle the idea of doing what you want, not when there are your self-imposed chains locking you in. Not when you have an episode just realising how badly you’ve ruined it all.

But you nod, and gratefully take the water handed to you. You don’t think about the skin as the hands leave yours. You don’t think about the human attached to it.

 

Feigning exhaustion (an excuse Asriel accepts only too eagerly), you’re allowed to sleep, and when you wake up, everything’s quiet.

You get to your feet gingerly, taking off the soft blanket that wasn’t there when you went to bed and folding it, and you feel your way around. The walls are solid wood, well-worn down and smooth to the touch; the bed you were persuaded to sleep on is a nest of furs and the finest wool you’ve ever felt; even the floor is a mess of tossed rugs, gentle on your walk-hardened feet. There’s little furniture that you can feel and you don’t want to go snooping anyway, so you find your way to the door and open it as slowly as you can.

The fire’s still going, as far as you can tell, but it’s lower and the heat is like a mist as you walk into it. About five paces from you, something starts tapping the floor softly. You turn to it.

“Thank you for letting me use your bed,” you mumble, hoping you’re not making an absolute fool of yourself. More than usual, that is. More than you already have.

“That’s okay.” There it is again: creaky and broken, barely a voice at all. It doesn’t seem to bother them, and they say, “You were out for a few hours. Asriel’s asleep too: he’s just over in the corner. Can we talk?”

That’s what you’re here for, so you nod and let the witch tug on your sleeve to lead you outside, ignoring the way their touch sends shivers through you. You’re brought to a seat carved in what feels like a log and you wait while they go back into the cottage only to come out with heavy mugs of tea for you both. It’s slightly too cool for you, but any tea is more than welcome.

“We can speak now,” they say. “I didn’t want to wake him up.”

You nod, shivering at the contrast of the night’s chill and the flowery tea in your hands. “I…sorry, what’s your name?”

“I’m Frisk. Do you want me to describe myself? Asriel said you like that.” Their voice is warming up now, but still as quiet as ever.

“That would be nice, thank you.”

“I’m…well, I’m human. We can’t get past that.”

You wonder how much Asriel’s told them, if they know what that means. But you shrug. “You can’t help it. I can’t either.”

“A very positive outlook,” they say approvingly. “I’m about a head shorter than you, probably a few years younger, dark cropped hair, dark skin and a lot more filled-out. I like wearing robes. You should consider it: robes are really versatile, they’re great.”

It’s calming: the tea, the sounds of the forest at night, and their voice. “What robe are you wearing now?”

“Feel this!” Material is prodded onto your hand and you obediently run your finger over it, avoiding their hand.

“Very soft.”

“Isn’t it?” they sigh happily. “It’s high in the neck and sleeveless – though I’m wearing sleeves under it: I’m not out to catch a cold here – and bright green. I mean, I buy my cloth based on the texture rather than the colour, but I’m still happy with this one. It’s my favourite: I put it on the second I felt you two come in here.”

“You felt us?”

“Oh, I feel anybody who comes in. Tied to the forest, you know. It tells me everything. I can’t leave because of the bond, but I don’t want to, so it doesn’t matter much.”

“Where do you get your cloth, then?” you ask almost teasingly.

“I’ve got people who come to me. And people bring gifts for solving their problems, that sort of thing. It’s a good system. I like the fey’s gifts the best, but there aren’t many around in this forest. It’s a shame.”

Humming a response, you drink deeply from your mug.

“Is this okay?”

You turn to them. “What do you mean?”

“Talking to me.”

“It’s okay. Just…don’t touch me skin to skin again, please. Not yet.”

“Whatever you need. Would you like me to try breaking the curse?”

“Can you?”

They laugh lightly. “I’d have to try before I know. I’ve done a few in the past, but they didn’t all work. And yours is strong: I can see it wrapped all over you. That witch must have hated you.”

You breathe a reply. A notably strong curse for a handful of buttercups. If you ever see that witch again, you’re going to kill them.

“Shall I?” Frisk prompts. You think there might be excitement in their voice, but you can’t say you share it. Even so, you nod and put your cup down on the grass by your feet.

There’s the tinkling of bells around you and the wind picks up, blowing your hair all over your face. Slowly, you feel the magic come upon you. It sets your hair on end all over your body, brushing feather-light as something moves towards you, and then you can see red.

It’s brilliant, dazzling, and it’s the first colour you’ve seen in so long that it takes your breath away. Shimmering and pounding scarlet in the darkness, pulsing in time with your heart, spreading over your arms and legs and torso and everywhere with each beat. Everything feels lighter. The magic takes the tension from you, lifting it a hair’s breadth off your body, the constriction loosening until it’s as if it were never there. You hadn’t known it was.

And then it all comes crashing back and the red is gone.

You choke, clutching your stomach as if someone had punched it, and it takes you a second to get used to the weight of yourself again.

“I’m sorry!” Frisk whispers, distressed. “I lost it: I had it in my hands, but it slipped and it’s tighter than ever now…Oh, I’m really sorry.”

You shake your head, reaching for your mug with trembling fingers. “Thank you for trying. No one else has been able to do it either.”

“But I _had_ it. I was so close!” There’s enough frustration in their voice that it worries you.

“It’s okay,” you say, uncertain. You still feel winded.

A small period of quiet and rustles and their breath. Then they say cheerfully, “Well, that was annoying. Let’s try something different: you weren’t told how to break it when they cast it, were you? That would be useful.”

“No, nothing.”

“That’s just rude of them. Okay. Well. I’m a little stumped,” they admit, embarrassed. “The curse was coming off really well. Or the top part was. That’s…it’s like the flowers are the curse, and they’ve grown around you now. And the original part is pliant and weak enough, but the rest of it is sticking to you like it’s meant to be there. Which it’s not.”

They fall silent, thinking it over, probably. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to you: magic and curses are so far from everything you’re used to and you don’t know the rules well enough to work out the solution. If you’re honest, it always sounds like they’re making it up on the spot, but you’re not about to say that.

But clearly Frisk isn’t going to succeed in fixing this either. You can accept that: there’s not much else you can do, and you need to reflect a bit anyway. You’re calmer now, and away from Asriel, and you can think without unpleasant thoughts swarming you.

You’re still scared, and you know you can’t go on like this. The fear that he’ll find out is more than you can take. But find out what? How ugly your eyes are? What a revolting excuse for a living being you are? The thoughts that plague you, the ones that tell you to hurt and cut and scratch? Your past, hooked into your present so firmly that you could never rip it away? Your uselessness: not even able to do the one thing you needed to, and kill yourself?

How much of a hopeless case you are?

There isn’t really an answer. You’re just scared. Maybe just for the sake of it: that sounds about right. Maybe because, while the idea of him ‘finding out’ and being disgusted with you is enough to leave you hollow, the idea of him not finding out is worse.

Imagine it: imagine he loves you, imagine you carry on with him, imagine he’s _him_ – helpful and compassionate and perfect – and imagine you’re you.

Maybe it’s other people’s disgust you should be scared of. Compared to all of that, the flowers don’t really bother you.

“I can’t think of anything.” Frisk’s voice catches you off guard. They sound miserable, but in a way that makes you want to keep very quiet so you don’t set anything off. You scrape your bare feet in the crinkled, muddy mess of leaves in front of you.

“I don’t think I can do this,” they say. “I’m worried that if I try again, the curse will tighten even more. So I’ve been thinking, but as far as I know, that’s not something curses should do. There should be a way out. There always is: that’s what makes it a curse, not damnation. And I mean, it’s possible that it’s one that only the maker can break, but those haven’t been in use for centuries. Too little room to be inventive, you know.”

You don’t.

“So if it’s not that, and I was so close to lifting it that it’s probably not, it’s…I’m not sure. Maybe there’s only one specific way you can get rid of it, and the others just make it worse. That might explain why it’s grown. But who knows!” they sigh heavily.

“You know a lot about curses,” you remark. “Virtually no one else seems to know how to deal with them.”

Frisk smirks: you can hear their breath. “Yeah, I know them. Or I thought I did. What a pain. Of course…” their voice goes pensive and you wait for them. “It’s not going to help you get rid of it, but I think…maybe it’s gotten so strong because you’re straying from the ‘cure’. Like a game of hot and cold, and you’ve been getting colder, so the curse is getting stronger. Or something.”

You get the impression they’re shrugging. Holding the now-lukewarm mug of mostly-drunken tea to your chest, you ask, “How am I supposed to work with that?”

“I…I don’t know. I’m sorry. I guess you could always do the old staying true to yourself and being confident thing: that might work. Or go and find the original witch. What did you even do to annoy them?”

It’s so humiliating, even now. As comforting as this is – the peace, broken only by Frisk chatting to you without prodding you for reciprocation you can’t give – you don’t want to say it.

“Sorry,” they say after a while of silence you couldn’t fill. “I didn’t want to pry.”

You haven’t even told Asriel the real reason why, so you shake your head and shrug and do all the little things to try and make them feel at ease without actually opening up. “It’s just embarrassing. Sorry.”

“Embarrassing?” There’s a laugh in their voice. “Well, if we’re talking _embarrassing_ , do you want to hear a story?”

Nodding, you turn your body towards them.

They’re a good storyteller. Quiet, but good: they make you laugh with their timing and impressions as they explain how they spent a day a year or two back getting into all sorts of trouble because they were in a new city and got mistaken for someone who looked vaguely like them and somehow everyone just assumed.

“So in the _end_ ,” they say heavily, “someone finally asked my name during this big monologue about how I’m a treacherous murderer or whatever it was, and by this point I’m thinking ‘These people are going to kill me, they’re actually going to kill me’ so I just blurted it out, right? And this guy looks at me, they all do, and then he says ‘Oh’ and walks away, still holding a bat with nails stuck through it. Then they all start shaking me and asking if I’m sure, and I’m like…am I sure I’m me? Who else am I supposed to _be_?! In the end they explained it and they all took me out for pie, though, so I consider it a day well spent. Except for the turtles, but that can’t be helped.”

“And what happened to the engagement?” you ask, stifling a giggle.

“That? Oh, we called it off. She said she thought I was a bit young anyway, but she let me keep the ring. Sold it and used the money for more robes.” They make a pleased sound.

“A good story, but I don’t see how it’s embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing for them?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll let that pass.”

“You can’t see, but I’m winking at you.”

You bow your head graciously. “Noted.”

“So…” There’s the scrape of them dragging their feet along the ground. “Have you got any stories like that?”

“No. It’s been an alternately boring or grim life.” It really has: you have funny stories, but it’s humour too dark to follow theirs.

“Well, at least it seems to be getting better? Hmm…I _could_ tell you the one about the time I got in a bar fight with a really obnoxious minstrel and somehow ended up helping him rake in more money than he’d seen all year, but…I’ll probably leave that until I can tell Asriel too. It’s a good one,” they add in a pleased voice.

“I can believe it.”

For a while, there’s the breathing period after laughter where you both collect your thoughts. Then, tentatively, they speak as if they’re talking to the trees in general and if you happen to hear as well then you’re welcome to answer. “What do you think you’re going to do now?”

Tilting your head, you make as if to look at them. A petal falls down your nose and you brush it away.

They clarify, “Asriel told me you’ve been to all the witches you planned to see: do you want me to write down some I know? I’ve got a few friends I can send you to.”

“You needn’t bother. But thank you.”

They pause a second. “If you say so.” Another pause, but this one feels weighted down. “…he’s not going to thank me for saying this, but you might want to talk to Asriel about that, make sure you’ve got the same ideas.”

“He’s already asked you for more names, hasn’t he?”

“He may have done.”

A sigh rakes your lungs. “He’s an idiot.”

Temptation is starting to grip you again, holding you captive to possibilities that you can’t give into. He’s a kid on an adventure: of course he’s going to want to keep going. You won’t blame him for that, but you want to. He doesn’t understand because you can’t tell him, and that makes it all worse. You need to explain it: that much is clear.

It’s counter-productive, seeing as how you decided to end this because you wanted to avoid him knowing. But you’re not blind enough to miss that he’s hurting. And if he asked for more witches, then…maybe he’s clinging to the same kind of naïve hopes that you are. It isn’t fun, it isn’t easy, and you don’t think you can leave him like that. Principles. Always fucking principles, even though it would be so much nicer to split off cleanly.

“Will you talk to him? Please?” Frisk asks in a small voice. You wonder what else he told them.

“I’ll try.”

“And…I’m sure that at least one person on that list will have a better idea than I do of how to break the curse, how to find the method you need. It’ll work out.”

You don’t say anything to that: you don’t really care about the curse anymore. Yes, you want to see again: there are so many things you want to see, all of them so close you can touch them but you can’t draw up images to go with touch and sounds. But there’s so much more to worry about that you just can’t care. Be blinded for the rest of your life, if it comes to it – what difference could it make?

You’ll never see Asriel’s face. You’ll never see him hurt.

Frisk clears their throat and stands up. “It’s getting late. Or it is already. Early, actually. We ought to go to bed, I think.” They bend down to pick up the mug you left at your feet and their hand brushes your leg.

You can’t help it: you jerk back, lifting your knees to your chest.

The two of you apologise at the same time, in much the same timbre. There’s a throttling silence you wish you could break, and then they lead you into the cottage with quiet directions. It’s all gone bitter, pasty on your tongue, and you’re being so difficult, you can’t make anyone happy.

But that sounds like it comes from a half-hearted habit more than any true feeling. It’s just to protect yourself from thinking about telling the truth.

 

Frisk sends the two of you off with smiles and food and a thick blanket you couldn’t refuse because they insisted it was their least favourite and you absolutely _had_ to take it or they were going to cry on you. Asriel thanks them properly (and you smile, hoping they know last night was your fault), and then you’re off again. Together. Silently. Stringing it out to the very end.

The morning passes with everything unspoken lying out between you. You try to find the courage to talk to him and face it all, and he…You don’t know. Maybe he’s just waiting for you to say it. Even with him this close, even with the fear of everything you’ve been running from making your chest volatile and airy, you feel calmer than you should. You need to do this.

You have principles, after all.

Sometime mid-morning, he asks you to stop. You’re led to a grassy area on what you assume is the outskirts of the forest: he describes the thin trees, the shrubs underneath, the bushes of star-like flowers of the palest pink, thick petals shining waxy like mother-of-pearl. But he sounds preoccupied – he asks you to sit, takes the pack off to leave it against a tree, and you’re not surprised when he brings up the subject first.

You’re only surprised by the words.

“Chara, I….can we talk about this? Because it kind of affects both of us, and I think…I think we need to talk it out. Please. I mean gosh, I don’t want to. I don’t want to at all: I’d be happy to never bring it up again, but I know it’s weighing on you and you want to leave. And I just…um, is it that bad? Do you…do you really want to leave that badly? Can’t you just stay, a little longer?”

You open your mouth to say something (you’re not sure what) but he leaps in again first, panicked and flustered.

“W-wait! I know…I know it’s got to be difficult and I know I’ve failed you, over and over again, and I know that you’re probably fed up with the curse not breaking and with being dependent on me and all the rest of it, and I know I messed up really badly by leaving you alone that morning and by asking about your past afterwards even though you specifically asked me not to – I know all that, I really do! I know you have every reason to be angry with me and I’ll take it all, but…” his voice cracks. “Is this really so horrible for you? Have I just ruined everything too many times? Because I can fix it, I promise, I can do it! I can…I can try, so…”

His breath shudders as he breathes in. “Or, are you bored of me? Do you just not want to be with me anymore? I…I…” he laughs weakly. “I don’t think I can fix that.”

It’s not fair: he has to know he’s not being fair, right? There are tears on the edge of every word and you fist your hands in the mess of grass and leaves by your legs. “It’s not that. It’s _not_.”

“Then what _is_ it?” His voice quavers and it hurts you. “I want to help you, I want to stay with you, I want this to work, I want to do _everything_ for you, but you won’t let me. Is that rejection? I don’t know! I don’t know anything, Chara: you have to tell me! Oh gosh, it’s so selfish, but I want to know. I don’t want you to leave me: I want to know!”

He’s really crying now: his voice is thick with it; he keeps gulping and breathing funnily. You feel frozen in place by his hands on your legs, tensed into fists. He won’t even give you the time to speak: it’s a flood, washing around you and pouring in your ears and mouth and nose – his desperation, breaking out of barriers you didn’t know he had up.

“I want you to trust me! I can’t force you – I won’t – but I want it so much that it feels like I can’t breathe every time you hide something. Would it hurt so much to just tell me? Just me? I’d never tell anyone else: you have to know that. I can help, I can be useful to you, I can make it all better if you trust me! If you’d…if you’d just tell me the things you hate, the things that scare you, the things I can help you avoid. But it’s too late, isn’t it? This is too late: I should have started earlier, I should have shown you that you could trust me earlier because now you want to leave and I’ve never wanted anything less in my whole life.”

He chokes down a breath and it sounds like a wail. “And this is pathetic, but…do you think you could tell me anyway? Even if you leave afterwards, I want to know you. What is it about other humans you hate so much? Why were you alone in the forest, that day? What’s in your past? Why did that witch curse you? Wh-”

“I was trying to kill myself.”

Your voice sounds hollow even to you, but you suppose that’s just how it is. Still, you got it out. That’s a victory, even if you don’t want to think of the rewards because Asriel’s gone utterly silent in front of you and you’re painfully aware of every sound he makes, every breath. The flood is gone: no more rush of frantic misunderstandings you could barely believe. No more hiding behind his words and the fragile hope that he’ll understand.

So you smile.

As if telling a story, you spread your arms out wide and keep the corners of your lips turned up. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I can’t let you go on thinking like that. You’re so wrong, did you know? Of course you didn’t. I didn’t tell you. I’m a fucking idiot and I thought it would be okay. So I’ll tell you now: I was trying to kill myself. I tried to eat that witch’s buttercups and they didn’t seem to appreciate it. A shame.”

You shrug, perfectly detached. “You’ve never seen, but my eyes are red. Nobody knows why: that isn’t something humans have. And I’m moody, I’m destructive, I get thoughts I don’t know what to do with, and I hurt myself when I’m hurting because that’s how I work. But humans don’t do that, they said. They didn’t want it to be their fault: what _would_ people think of them if the child they raised was so painfully inhuman? So I was a changeling. They were poor, downtrodden, good-hearted people who only did their best with the unnatural child they were dealt. How sad. And things happened, complications arose, and I ran away. It didn’t work. There was nothing left, so I remembered what they’d always told me: the only way to redeem the mistake of my life is with my death. It seemed a fair exchange. The witch stopped me. You stopped me again.

“And now what am I to do? All this time, I’ve been telling myself that I’ll go along with it, we’ll part ways, and I can finish what I started. It would be so easy.” A laugh escapes your lips. “Wouldn’t it be easy? It’s the best solution for everyone, isn’t it? I think so. It’s so simple, and it makes so much sense, but I can’t do it now. Isn’t that funny? I can’t, because of you!”

Your laughter is choking you now – your words are hysterical. “Killing myself has always – _always!_ – been there: it’s so comforting! I won’t have to deal with anything anymore, I won’t have to live as myself anymore! But you’ve given me this fairy tale life and I don’t want to do it now. I’m such a _coward_! I don’t know how to go on if the comfort of my death isn’t looming in the distance. I’m terrified of this, of a future I never wanted, of the idea that I might love you and that I can’t do what I’ve always aspired to do because you’re _here_ , but I can’t possibly inflict myself on you! There’s nowhere for me to turn! So why did you have to do it?”

The words and laughter have run dry. The sick sense of detachment is peeling from you; your arms quiver and fall to your sides. You’re not narrating a story: you’re you. It’s you, it’s always been you.

Before that can set in, Asriel’s holding you to him so tightly that you think you might suffocate and save yourself a lot of trouble in doing so.

“You’re an idiot,” he gasps into your neck. You can feel him crying, but there’s no sobbing, no sound at all.

“You’re worse,” you mumble back. “You thought I wanted to leave you because I was _bored_?”

“What was I supposed to think?! You wouldn’t say anything, you just closed up and…oh Chara, I’m so _relieved_. And all because I gave you a reason to live?” There’s something giddy in his voice. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I never noticed, I never thought to ask in a way that would make you feel safe, I’m so sorry! But it’s fine: I’ll make everything okay! You won’t have to feel like you need to die anymore, I’ll make sure you never have to feel like that again.”

You stiffen in his arms. “What do you mean?”

“Um, it’s kind of arrogant I guess,” he pulls away from you but keeps his hands on your shoulders, “but if I helped you get rid of those thoughts, then I can keep doing it, right? I can make it go back to normal, right?”

Back to normal, because you’re not normal now. How many times have you heard that? ‘Unnatural’. ‘Inhuman’. ‘Demon’.

You cover his hands with yours and you can feel the stiff smile pushing back into place. “There’s nothing wrong with thinking like that. It _is_ normality.”

“But…it’s wrong,” he says nervously. “Wanting to die isn’t…”

“I don’t want to die: I want to kill myself, there’s a _difference_. And let’s get this straight,” –because if he holds you like that again, believing he’s holding a different person, you won’t be able to take it– “I have urges. I have ways to deal with them. I do not like myself. I have things linking me to the past so tightly that I’ll probably never be able to get free. I don’t want to: on some level I know it’s all wrong, and on another the only thing I can feel is the certainty that everything they told me was right. So I have ways to deal with it and sometimes that involves hurting myself. Sometimes it involves holding myself back from hurting others by destroying things. I cannot promise I’ll always be okay. You have to understand this.”

He has to, because if you’ve put yourself out and he’s disgusted, or he thinks you’re pitiful, or…or he thinks you need to be fixed, then you’ll walk away. Fuck sight, fuck life, and fuck him: if he thinks he can fix you, you’ll leave.

You may be broken, but you’ll fix yourself if it happens at all. You’re not desperate enough to take disgust or pity.

“I do understand,” he says, so surely that something in your chest leaps. “But…you have to understand too. I’m never going to be okay with it. This isn’t…it isn’t right, to feel like that about yourself.”

“But I do. That’s _me_.” You speak through gritted teeth.

“And I’ll accept that! I will, I promise! It’s just…I can’t do it right now. The thought of other people hurting you makes me so angry I don’t know who I am anymore, and the thought of you doing it to yourself is…” He swallows heavily. “I’ll get there. I swear I will. And, I mean, I think I’ve known it was like that all along. I just didn’t want to think about it. But I don’t think any less of you for it, you know. It’s just worry. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know.” You do, too. There isn’t a scrap of disgust in his voice, and his hands are as strong as ever on your shoulders. Your legs are beginning to cramp but you don’t want to move them, not right now.

“S-so…what do we do now? Do you still want to leave? Is it…am I still not enough to make you stay?”

The words hit you harder than his strength ever could and you’re almost certain it’s on purpose: how can he still think that? “I…” you swallow dryly. “You’re the only person who could ever make me stay.”

It’s a small un-truth, a disservice to all the people you’ve met on this journey who have treated you better than you ever deserved, but he makes a noise of joy so heartfelt that it’s worth it. Anything is worth it to hear that again.

“So it’s not too frightening? It’s not too much? It’s okay?”

He’s still holding you, even after you told him. You’re not fool enough to think he fully understands yet, but it’s something. It’s hopeful. And you’re so susceptible to hope.

“It’s okay,” you whisper.

For a moment or more, there are only miscellaneous sounds around you that you can barely spare the attention to recognise. Everything hangs on him.

“Can I describe you?” he asks, and for a second you honestly think you misheard him.

“…okay…?”

He brushes a hand through your hair, ruffling the flowers so the petals tickle your nose. “Your hair is the colour of redwood bark – dark at the roots, lighter further down, and it always sticks out here,” –he pokes the back of your head gently- “and here, and here. Sometimes it sticks out so far I can’t stop looking at it. Your flowers curl around your head like a crown. They look beautiful, you know. They used to be fixed in place but now there are stalks and flower heads in every which way. The yellow is so close to gold that it makes your face look even paler than usual, but…that’s good, when you blush. It makes your skin look like the sunset in-”

“You’re doing the simile thing _now_?” you shriek. “Now?! Is this really the time?”

“You’re blushing, though: it worked!”

“If I’m blushing, it’s at even knowing someone as embarrassing as you, let alone being on speaking terms,” you hiss back, trying to ignore the softness of his fingers on your cheeks.

“Oh Chara, that’s rude,” he says reproachfully.

“Good. You deserve it.”

“But…if I remember correctly, didn’t you say you thought you loved me?” His voice is unforgivably smug.

“I never did.”

He traces his fingers down to cup your face. “You did _so_.”

“That is vile slander.”

“It’s true. You said it.” He must be smiling so widely he can barely speak properly – that’s what it sounds like. “And…I think I’m the same. Or heck, I _know_ I am. I’ve known ever since I saw you. Do you have any idea how beautiful you looked in that flower patch, even covered in golden petals and blood?”

There’s awe in his voice and all you can do is make a strangled sound. Luckily (or unluckily: you’re not sure how much more you can take), he’s not finished.

“I, oh gosh, I’ve never stopped thinking of you. It’s almost a kindness that you can’t see, because it means you don’t know how much I stare at you. That first night at Papyrus’ house, I woke up, and you were there, and you looked so vulnerable that I couldn’t stop watching you.”

“That’s so weird!” you protest in a hoarse voice.

“And it’s just been getting worse and worse,” he says helplessly, a breathy laugh at the end. “When I saw you that morning near the temple, it’s like I’d never been angry before. I’d never known true rage before then, because all I wanted was to kill them.”

“Do you ever _stop_?” He’s being so earnest that it’s honestly scaring you, but you never want it to end.

“I can’t stop! Look, Chara, I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone before. The idea of you leaving made me feel like throwing up, I was so scared! You can’t leave, please tell me you’ll never leave.”

You need to stop him if he can’t do it himself. None of this makes sense to you.

Putting your hands on his and carefully moving them off your face, you look up to exactly where you know his face is. “I can’t promise that. But I’m happy here. I have nothing to go back to. And…I don’t think I’m enough of an idiot to ruin this just so I can redeem myself.”

“That’s another thing!” he says, shattering what _had_ been a quiet atmosphere. His hands tighten on yours like he’s determined not to let them be. “You don’t have to redeem yourself! No: hear me out. You don’t need to repay the world for existing, Chara. If your parents were too stupid to see that, then they can go and die for all I care, or I’ll kill them: you have nothing to redeem. You’re you and you may have messed up here and there but we all do that, and I think you’ve been doing so well that I’d be proud of you if that wasn’t super weird.”

“Not that that’s stopped you so far,” you remark dryly because sarcasm is a refuge when nothing else works.

“Your thoughts and your…your urges are your own, but you don’t have to redeem anything. Even if you hate yourself or want to hurt yourself, don’t feel like there’s anything to repay.”

You flash him a helpless grimace: how are you supposed to stop feeling that? It’s the logic of the world to you: people work for their place, and if they’re damned from the start then they seek redemption. That’s how it is. You’re worthless, so there’s only one option. That’s how it _works_.

“Okay, if that’s no good, um…” he rocks back and forth a little in thought. “Then live for me.”

“I’m sorry, _what_?”

“Wouldn’t that solve everything?” he asks, excited. “If you need to feel like you have a reason to be here, or that someone needs you for something, or anything else to prove that your birth wasn’t a mistake,” he spits the word, “then just live for me.”

“Making myself dependent on one person. That sure sounds like it’s not going to blow up in my face.”

“I wouldn’t let it,” he says happily, bringing your hand to his face and nuzzling it gently enough to send goose-bumps racing up your arms.

“It’s so unfair on you.” It’s so tempting.

“I don’t mind at all.”

He really doesn’t: you believe that without effort. But it’s the oddest thing. Everything feels airy and fluffy, a world apart, and you want to keep it that way.

Why can’t you?

Would it be so dreadful to let yourself be happy?

(Yes)

But would it be so dreadful to let Asriel be happy? Couldn’t you do that? And…if it was part of the deal, couldn’t you live for him? It’s such a bad idea, so filled with holes that it might as well be lace, but it reaches for you and grabs you by the neck until it’s all you want to breathe. And it’s worked until now, you remind yourself. This isn’t a fantasy, no matter how much it feels like one. He really does need you. He wouldn’t reject you. He hasn’t, even though you were so sure he would.

Impossibilities beckon you and you fall towards them.

“…Chara…?” Asriel’s voice is an empty mockery of its usual self, and you start in surprise.

“What?”

“The…the flowers…”

You pull your hands back from him, reach to touch your face. The petals – so strong and thick – are withering under your touch: tacky, wrinkled skin falling away from your fingers. They’re dying. They’re actually dying. Without waiting to think it through, you tear at the vines and they come away like ribbons, flung to the ground until your head is lighter than it’s been in over a month.

Wincing, you open your eyes.

Not without amusement at the irony, you note that it’s blinding. The light is unforgiving and relentless; the colours are a hundred times brighter and duller than you remembered. And there’s him.

For innumerable heartbeats, the two of you look at each other, eyes wide (yours aching, pleading with you to close them again). And then, at the same time, he says “You’re so beautiful” and you say “Fuck, you really are huge”.

A beat, and then the two of you burst into relieved laughter (your eyes thanking you for the rest as you squeeze them shut). You sprawl back on the ground, laughing yourself hoarse and it feels so _good_. It’s not armour or hysterics: it’s just you and you can _see_. There are tears in your eyes before you can help it and you wipe them away, relishing the simple feel of your eyeballs under your fists.

“This is ridiculous!” you cry out to the sky.

“What did you do?” Asriel calls back.

“We’ve been to fuck knows how many witches and Frisk’s twee advice of ‘staying true to myself and being confident’ is what breaks it? I’m going to scream.”

“Oh, don’t.” He pulls on your arms to get you sitting up again and you gaze at each other stupidly. Well, he does it stupidly: you have an excuse. There’s just so much of him, it’s unnecessary. So much grubby white fur – streaked with gold on his face and around his ears – and those _horns_ , and his _hands_ , and you can’t stop looking, taking everything in hungrily.

“I, um…” he starts self-consciously. “I worried you wouldn’t want anything more to do with me, once you’d seen me. I mean, obviously you knew vaguely what I look like, but…I was still scared.”

“You needn’t have been,” you say without looking up. In the end, he has to lift your chin with his hand, and it’s then that you realise how close the two of you are. Because you can tell that sort of thing for sure now. You can tell just how deep the copper of his eyes goes. You can see it all.

Your breath’s grown short when he runs a thumb across your lips and, unthinking, you kiss it. The effect is immediate: his eyes go wide, his jaw drops open, he starts to stutter, and you lean up to kiss him before he can.

For a brief, terrible second, he makes a choking sound and you think you’ve somehow got it wrong, but then his arms are back around you and he pulls you into his lap so you can wrap your legs around his waist. They only just go the whole way round – he’s _ridiculous_ – but you barely have the time to think about that because at that moment he tilts his head and opens his mouth to yours. You hum in approval and reach your hands up to his horns, curling your fingers into the fine hair at the bases and the touch makes him arch his back up so his chest is against yours. You can feel every hurried heartbeat.

When you break away, he falls to lie on his back and you follow, bracing yourself with hands either side of his head. You know you’re flushed (you can feel the scorching heat, and you hate it), but it’s worth it to see him smile like this. It’s worth it to smile like this, to crinkle up your eyes and see him happy.

“I’m going to love you forever,” he says dreamily.

“Let’s not go making rash promises.” You flick his forehead lightly and he takes hold of your wrist, bringing your hand to his mouth so he can kiss each finger individually. So your efforts at chastisement backfired, and you can’t quite care. Your face feels like it’s about to break from smiling, and not in the stiff, dry way it usually does.

“It’s not rash,” he assures you.

“It _is_.”

“It’s not!”

You grin. The two of you will bicker, neither of you will win, you’ll probably not end up leaving the clearing for hours, and when you do it will be to go back to Frisk’s cottage. What happens after that, you don’t know. It doesn’t matter. He’s so happy (you’re so happy), and you feel you’ll stay with him for as long as you can. You couldn’t leave now, not for all the validation and redemption in the world.

You have principles, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this chapter took forever to write, in the end. That's the end, and I hope it's satisfying! I had a great time writing this one, so with any luck it's been enjoyable to read as well.
> 
> Daphne (pink flowers at the end) – I would not have you otherwise, Elderflowers – compassion


	6. We've Come This Far on Prayers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As the old can feed the new, so can the new feed the old.
> 
> ...which is a pompous way of saying that the series I'm currently into has got me hooked on the idea of 'The Journey', and I wanted to explore it like this. This chapter is basically dripping with references, but it shouldn't be too distracting (notably, the theme of 'I'm half made of things he taught me' is not of my making) (uninterestingly, only one of the settings - the frozen lakes - is a reference, since I prefer to use European settings rather than North American, so I can use my own experience)
> 
>  
> 
> Anyway. I didn't think I was coming back to this, or Undertale, or fanfiction in general, but here we are.  
> This one's about learning, and learning to stop running away.

The words ‘ _maybe we should settle down_ ’ have been growing between the two of you. They’re like burrs, sticking to your trousers and his fur, and you can’t get rid of them. Burrs are like that. They stick where you can’t see, and soon they’re clinging to you, digging into your skin, scraping you raw.

“It doesn’t have to be right now,” he said over a campfire once. You’ve gotten so good at making campfires now, in any weather, in any location. Why would you need a hearth? You shrugged and grunted something, and you changed the subject.

“Where’s been your favourite, out of all of the places we’ve stayed? Do you think you’d like to live there?” he asked as he helped you over a river into a field. It was filled with sheep, curious enough to come and _baa_ near you, and you were struck with the thought – will he expect me to take up a profession, an apprenticeship? Or worse, will he not? You bent over to stroke a sheep with a brief prayer that it would be free of sheep ticks, and you gave him a non-committal answer.

And so you continued, and continue. The both of you, walking side by side, the space between you bursting with burrs. Does he feel them too? Or does he feel something else – the thorny resistance sprouting from your very skin, the nettles of your words that sting him with their lack of enthusiasm.

Itching, itching, itching the both of you.

It’s been five years now, which is no small amount of time to be living as nomads. But, for a life, it’s very short. Does he understand that? Haven’t you told him time and again in the curve of your smile, the warmth of your body, your presence itself? Doesn’t he understand that this journey is your life, that this is _you_?

You feel as if half of you is made up of things he’s taught you. No, more: it’s three quarters, four fifths, five sixths, and on, and on, until only slithers of ‘you before him’ remain, and you don’t mind, but it means that anything beyond what you’ve known these five years is unthinkable. Everything you have is what he’s given you or what you’ve built together. All you want to know is this journey: this never-ending trip he’s growing tired of, woven from prayers and chance encounters and always, always the things he’s taught you.

 

You don’t remember dates or relative temporal distance anymore. There was one autumn – how many years ago? – where the two of you found yourselves in sheep country, more so than ever before. It was where you learnt to fear ticks, where he taught you to keep your trousers tucked tightly into your boots, and to always check the hairless parts of your body first for tiny specks that might just as well have been birthmarks. It felt horrible at the time – evenings were filled with tweezers and squeezing your eyes shut and glaring at him for how he teased you – but you can admit now how happy you were then, too. You can admit how much you loved it when he offered to carry you on his back when the grass grew tall, and how he would conveniently forget to let you down, until you found yourself lulled to sleep with your head between his horns.

It happened on more than one occasion, in more seasons than that one autumn.

There was a lazy, melty summer where he refused to do it, but that was because of the heat. The two of you walked along seaside cliffs in the mornings, and when it grew too hot, you took refuge in coves and rock-pools. He taught you how to eat the mussels and winkles you found (you hated how slimily they slipped down your throat, and he laughed at your expression, and you pounced on him, tickling him until he begged for mercy). The summer drew on like a stale joke, and as the temperatures rose, you went inland, where it was hotter but less humid. There, there were afternoons in sweltering cork forests; the trees were stripped of their bark just as you were stripped of your clothes, dipping into lakes to float with the pond-skaters under watercolour-blue skies. He taught you how to fish there, though it was less ‘taught’ than ‘learnt with you’, because neither of you were good at it.

You still aren’t.

There was a spring (recent, you think) when you went down to a fishing town and learnt how it’s done professionally. It was one of the seasons you spent working: he on a fishing trawler, you doing odd jobs around the town for the monsters who lived there. It was a mixed town, and you kept to the monster side as much as possible, but there were always mistakes. He taught you how to always look busy, so as not to be approached, and he taught you – to the best of his abilities – to defend yourself, just in case. You never had to, in the end. It was a town of grey skies and grey stone, ripe with the smell of old salt and fish, crumbling apart like the sand of its grey beaches.

You left earlier than planned, and you went to the mountains.

That year, the mountains were unseasonably cold, and you were grateful for your easy proximity with him. It took little more than the crook of a finger, or the slightest glance, for him to come and cuddle with you. You stayed in a monster village surrounding a crystal blue lake, and which was surrounded in turn by crooked, snow-covered peaks. Everywhere, there were pine trees, and he found himself enjoying the lumber business, while you took refuge in a tanner’s, picking up the dialect and learning the basics of the trade. You always smelt rank, but it was better than the smell of fish, to you. Still, you got through bar upon bar of fatty soap, and he taught you how to weave herbs and flowers together to make little charms that helped ward away the smell. It was, he said, for his benefit too, and you grinned before running after him, threatening to spread the smell to him. You sprinted, and he jogged, and he let you push him into the snow until you were both freezing and wheezing with laughter.

It was a little after that, the first time he mentioned settling down.

Now it’s the tail end of winter, and the two of you have been trailing around a frozen wasteland for the best part of two weeks. You don’t mind. The two of you sleep longer, wrapped up together, and it’s quiet. It’s all crunching footsteps and chattering birds, and the aching silence of subjects you won’t bring up.

Burrs rub against your skin, and you’ve taken to scratching your arms more, now. It’s something to do when you’re nervous, though he winces when he notices you doing it.

Scratching, scratching, scratching the both of you.

“We haven’t been to see Frisk for a while,” he says one day.

You make a sound of acknowledgement, because it’s true – you haven’t. You should, but you’re a long way away from their golden forest now. You straighten up, staring out over the icy lakes that stretch out to the horizon every way you look. Your pack weighs heavily on your shoulders, but it’s bearable: your body has been growing stronger.

Your mind has clearly not, and you start down the snowy hill rather than reply properly.

“Chara, watch out!” he calls, but half-heartedly, as he follows you. You both come to a less-than-graceful stop near the edge of the lake; with the snowy hill rising behind you, striped birch trees are the only things breaking up the scenery.

“Are we crossing the lake?” you ask, but you know.

“Yeah,” he says, though he knows you know.

You stare at the ice critically. “That looks a bit suicidal, actually.”

His weak laugh comes out as white clouds in front of his whiter fur. Stretching his big, strong arms above his head, he looks out at the lake. “In the last village, they were saying that there’s a special path to cross over. The people who live here leave logs under the water, or something. I didn’t really get it, but I think we just need to look for that.”

“For logs that might or might not be there, which might then help us get across, or might just as well send us to a very chilly death?”

“Yes,” he says, because he’s used to your teasing now. Unfortunate.

“Then, by all means, let’s look.”

You go to the right, since you have to go one way or the other, and the two of you walk slowly while keeping an eye on the ice a few paces from your feet. The snow is particularly uneven here, and you find yourself reaching out to take his arm. He gives it willingly, of course. It’s nostalgic. It’s almost peaceful too, but he apparently feels the need to speak, which you would have no problem with were it not for the subject he chooses to talk about.

He opens his mouth (the sound is audible in the deep silence blanketing you), breathes in, and says, “I want to settle down soon. I don’t know how much longer I can keep travelling around like this for.”

You don’t say anything, because avoidance has always been the sweetest temptation to you.

It might be your imagination, but his footsteps seem to crush the snow down harder than before. “I feel unanchored. I love being with you, and seeing these things with you, but I’ve started to wonder when it’s going to end. When we’re going to be able to live with some stability.”

Your cheeks are as hard as the ice around you: you feel as if you’re unable to even open your mouth, let alone say anything. You don’t want to be here, you don’t want to be having this conversation, you don’t want to be the obstacle in his way, you don’t want to _do_ this.

But he knows that. And if he sees you struggling now, he’ll sigh, and he’ll say it’s okay, and he’ll let it drop.

That’s another thing you’ve learnt from him.

He shivers, his arm moving closer to his side, and you go with him, almost tripping over your own boots because your eyes are still on the snow-dusted ice next to you. He says, “I don’t mean right now, and I don’t want to do anything you’re not comfortable with, but would it be so hateful to you? We could find a place where you’re surrounded by scenery you like, and we could do anything we wanted – we’ve learned enough trades by now, right? Surely. We could go down to the coast: you like beaches at night, right? Or we could go to somewhere with lots of vineyards, and you can work up a tan again. We could go anywhere you like. I want you to be comfortable.”

There’s a birdcall you don’t recognise coming from the birch trees. You want to yell at it, scream at it, beg it to stop, plead with it to give you some silence to think, to come up with the right words. As if it could hear you, it stops, and you’re left without excuses. The right words aren’t coming to you, because they don’t exist. Because there’s no right way of saying ‘no’, to this. There’s no right way of saying ‘I won’t bend, though you would – and do – bend head over heels for me at my slightest whim’. It’s not the right thing to say.

He laughs; a cloud of white floats and disperses in front of your eyes. “Chara, can’t you say something?”

You want to apologise, but you’re not sure what for, and he’s always taught you not to apologise if you’ve done nothing wrong. You have, but an apology isn’t going to help. You need an answer, and it needs to be the right one.

Stalling for time, you hum tunelessly and tilt your chin down into the thick scarf wrapped around your neck. As a final touch, you rest your head against his arm, and you think, your eyes full of a hundred different shades of white that, somehow, come together to make the world around you. You need to agree. You need to tell him that you will settle down with him, sometime in the near future. You need to appreciate that this is something he wants, and that – just as he always puts your comfort first – so too must you.

It’s not something you’ve ever learnt from him. You know why, and you feel the urge to laugh, but you suppress it, like logs pushed under ice.

“Chara, please.” His voice is tight.

How cruel you are, how base, how irredeemably selfish to put yourself before this man, this monster. How could you? You crunch the snow underfoot as if it were your own face, and you try to think clearly in a mind murky with guilt.

Would it be so bad? After all of this, would it be so bad to try something new? Yes, this is your life after your rebirth – your reckless abandonment of everything that came before – but couldn’t you move on, and try living in a different way? Would it truly be so horrible? Is this the only way you can be happy?

No, of course not. You’re happy because it’s with him. It isn’t the journey, or the sights: it’s the fact that you’re sharing them with him. It’s not sunny meadows or damp caves or pine forests or untouched beaches: it’s trying to fit a daisy chain around his horns, it’s laughing at him when he shrieks at all the cold drops hitting his back, it’s walking in peaceful silence together, it’s sleeping in sunny summer with your head on his stomach and the sound of the waves in your ears.

It’s him, and it’s you, and it’s what you’ve built and grown together. It’s what you didn’t believe yourself capable of; it’s what you didn’t believe existed, until you met him.

Haven’t you learnt to trust him? Hasn’t he taught you that? Why do you think you won’t be able to be happy settled down – won’t you be with him?

You’ve taken too long, and he sighs, pushing his hands in his pockets in such a manner that you’re almost pushed away. It’s on purpose, and you know you deserve it, since he doesn’t even say anything. He knows better than to pressure you, and as he won’t, you let go of his arm and you say, “Okay.”

He stops walking, though you keep going, looking down at the ice. You can’t feel the skin of your face: it’s too cold.

“Okay?”

“I said okay. I’m okay with it. Not right now, but…in the next few months, we can start thinking about settling down somewhere.”

You keep walking, and since his arm is nowhere to be found, you shove your hands in your own pockets to escape the chill. It takes a few seconds before he bounds after you, swinging an arm around your shoulders like a second, iron-inlaid scarf. “You really don’t mind?”

“I kind of do, but I think I’m just exaggerating how bad it’ll be. I’ll come round to it.” Maybe. Probably. You hope. “I don’t want to be in a fishing town, though. I hate the smell. And you’re not allowed to gloat over this, by the way.”

He seems to be practically buzzing, and you screw up your face as he pushes a kiss to your cheek. “Of course I won’t.”

“Sure. You little liar: I can feel the gloat seeping off you. Just- …oh,” you say, coming to a stop. He stops with you, and you both stare out at the lake and the path opening up to you like a horizontal ladder with uneven rungs. “There were logs after all.”

 


	7. The Sweet Sacrifice of Sugar Mountain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone put the idea of doing a Valentine’s Day fic in my head, and I decided I wanted to do something more serious than fluffy.  
> (Also it's still the 13th but I'm impatient, so)
> 
> This whole thing is rife with references again – not least the title, the theme of sacrifices, and the specific sacrifice detailed – for which I apologise, but I did try and keep it original and specific to this world anyway. And besides, I don’t think the subject of this one is something I ever really addressed here, or in many of my fairy tales. It’s something I probably should have addressed before, really.

It was an accident. They happen all the time: the natural world likes to bare its teeth to keep you from getting too complacent. Sometimes it’s sheep ticks, sometimes it’s sunburn, and sometimes it’s the craggy edge of a mountain path giving way in a shock of dust and scraping stone.

You remember most of it in flashes – images strung along with the jitters of adrenaline and your own fear. The sight of the path flying under your feet as you ran down the next meander so you could reach him; the shock of red matted with his fur, everywhere; the mottled dark patches on the sand as it had begun to rain, and you couldn’t do anything but slowly – painfully slowly – drag his body to shelter. You don’t know where you found the strength. You don’t know where you found the calm and distance needed to cut his fur away, wash and dress the worst of it as best you could. You did, though.

A little under a day later, he wakes up next to you in the cave you found for yourselves. A little groggy, considerably more achy, and now minus the use of one leg. Everything under the knee is crushed: a mangled mess of fur and flesh that you see every time you close your eyes. He looks at it for a long time after you’ve filled him in, his hand dwarfing yours, though you squeeze tighter to make up for it.

What does he want to do?

He pauses. Keep going as you always do, he decides, with a look you can’t read. You’ll go to Frisk like you were planning to, see if they can do anything about this, and you’ll carry on as usual. It doesn’t have to change.

The two of you should stay here a few days to help him heal up. His leg got the worst of it, but that doesn’t mean the rest of him got away unscathed.

No.

No?

No. You’ll go as you were planning to. It doesn’t matter, because he’s fine now – it’s just a leg.

So you nod, because he was the one who taught you medicine in the first place, and you make up some loose excuses to keep him in the cave a few hours longer, which might stretch into a night (‘ _There’s no point in travelling at night_ ,’ he’s always said, so you’ll use his words against him), and you’ll leave the next morning.

He doesn’t say anything about it, though he must surely know, and you don’t say anything either. The words are bitter on your tongue – ‘ _It’s crushed, Asriel.  I don’t think just setting it is going to be enough. You shouldn’t walk_ ’ – but you don’t say them.

He stares out at the mountain’s evening downpour and he doesn’t say anything either.

 

The going is slow, with his arm welded to your shoulders, pushing down on you for every step he needs to take. You don’t mind, though you know he does. You keep the conversation going lightly, and he joins in so it’s almost like normal: you talk about things you see, or books you once read, or vague future plans for ‘settling down’, or just poke fun at each other. It’s a victory each time you make him laugh with your snide, deadpan humour, because even if it means he shakes against you, threatening to topple the both of you over, it’s good. Smiles come easily, then.

Those are the exception, though: he’s so sombre. Normally, he always smiles at you when you look up at him for something or nothing, but now you can only see blank eyes staring far off, so you keep your eyes on the road to avoid them. It was better when you sprained your ankle a year or so back, or when you managed to break your arm falling down from a tree you were so sure you could climb. He’d wrapped you up and carried you and laughed about it with you, with the best bedside manner you could have asked for.

Are you doing it wrong? Would he prefer you say something, because he can’t bring it up? Does he need you to be forceful about it rather than…this?

You don’t want to be. You want to believe that not saying anything is the right way forward. But most of all, you want to get him off the mountain and down into the forests surrounding its base, and to Frisk’s. You’re going to be as good as you can be.

Predictably, you get it wrong.

The rain around you is constant: it’s an excuse not to talk, but it brings nothing but white noise. He stops speaking so much, and it’s like every step for him is a crank of a clockwork key, winding him up to something you don’t even want to imagine. The cuts on his head and back scab up easily enough, but there’s nothing either of you can do about his leg, and you both know it.

Rain pours down and down, seeping into every crack, until your skin feels like dampness itself.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, you’re not.”

“No, but I’m fine. Really. Stop worrying about it: I wasn’t this much of a worrywart when you broke _your_ leg, was I?”

“When did that happen?”

“Oh, gosh…two years ago? You fell down a hill. It wasn’t your finest moment.”

“I’ve had worse.”

The two of you debate it, and the conversation comes to nothing. You’re relieved, and you think he is too, so maybe talking about it isn’t the right way to go. It’s not as if you’d know, anyway. All you know is how to rest your head on his shoulder and wish he’d lean on you too, so you could share warmth in the incessant rain.

 

He’s set on getting to Frisk’s. He says that they’ll be able to fix what the two of you can’t, so he hurries, and you try and indulge him with earlier starts and later stops, pushing yourselves to go faster now you have this handicap he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

The mountain spreads out into forests and it should be easier now, but it’s not – rain turns to mists, and fog in the mornings because it’s colder now, like winter reaching out one last time to grab your heels. He speaks even less, and you don’t know what to say. It feels like you just got rid of the burrs between you, and now there’s a tension stretching the two of you to breaking point; an unspoken thorn in your feet because he knows and you know and he knows you know but neither of you will say it, so it’s just hanging there like the heady scent of wild garlic in the forests, growing over you like rot from rain damage.

“How much longer, do you think?” he asks as you come into a forest village, regrettably full of humans.

Sticking closer to him, you try to calculate it. “Another two days? I think you should see if they have a healer here, though. It’s not…” _looking healthy_ , you want to say, but he has to know. And he nods; you feel relief, like you’ve been released from something you didn’t know was snagging you. He knows.

But he says, “No, it’s okay. I don’t really want to go through all that, and it’ll cost too much. Magic can heal it all up.”

You’re snagged again. This village doesn’t seem to have an inn, so you’re making your way to a promising-looking barn, ready to pay for the luxury of sleeping there. It takes until Asriel’s made small talk, weathered the usual comments about his physical appearance, and paid for the night, until you can say, “I think it’s gotten worse.”

“Do you?”

It feels a little like a slap. Is the unsaid ‘ _and how would you know better than me?_ ’ your imagination?

“Yes.”

“Well, if it is or isn’t, magic will work just the same, you know? It’s going to be fine, Chara! You really need to stop worrying about this so much.”

The two of you walk into the barn – filled with crates, barrels, rows of logs, and the salty, woody smell that comes with storage sheds – and see the loft you’re going to be staying in tonight.

You say, “I can worry if I want to.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, you know. We’re…” He stops, and corrects himself. “It’s getting cleaned properly, and what more can we do? Let’s worry about it if it festers, but not before.”

“That’s too _late_. I just think that ignoring it is only going to– wait, don’t!”

Like an idiot, he’s trying to heave himself up the ladder to the loft. That in itself would be worrying, but he’s wearing the bigger of the packs too, and this barn was not made for people of his size. Everywhere, wood is creaking like a shrill chorus of threats, and you run over to him, holding useless hands out just in case he falls. He doesn’t, and you wouldn’t have been able to help if he had, but what else were you supposed to do?

You glare at him when he eventually turns around. “That was stupid.”

“What, climbing up?”

“At least take the bag off first!”

“Oh, I should have done that, yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Just be careful!” You begin to climb up after him, and the ladder creaks again, though less so. There’s still a sour expression on his face when you get up to the loft, but he does a pretty good job of trying to hide it.

What can you say to get him to start talking to you again? It’s going to eat him up from the inside, and it’s just a…well, it’s not ‘just’ a wound, but it’s not the end of the world either. But he doesn’t talk to you about it that evening, or that night. You’d have been an idiot to think he would.

With the dull sounds of a village at night playing around you, you watch him when he’s sleeping; you stroke his face and the still-growing fur on the side of his head where he cut it open. It’s like he’s the one locking himself up this time, too aggrieved to admit he feels anything. Is it because of the loss of mobility? That sort of thing can be worked around, and even if it’s difficult to get used to, that’s no excuse to push you away so perfectly.

It’s not that, of course. You know full well what _it_ is, but you don’t want to think about it. Maybe he doesn’t either, and that’s why he won’t talk to you about it. ‘It’ can just hang between you, he can just keep winding up, you can just keep worrying, until it all explodes and you’re at the mercy of the shrapnel.

The situation can’t come to that: you won’t let it. But how are you supposed to pry him open when you’ve never had to before? He never taught you this.

Next morning, he wakes you up, and you set off an hour earlier than sunrise.

The last leg of it is a race: he is a man running from past sins, running to new hope, and every minute wasted is too much for him. You feel the fever through him and you have to keep pace, walking through misty forests, pine needles everywhere, pleading with eyes that he won’t meet. It’s a stunted kind of progress. A few times, he tries to hobble along by himself, but he can’t do it. It’s painful to watch, and you’re under his arm again in a second, even when he tells you to give him a chance.

A chance to do what? He can’t even put weight on that leg. Every time he tries, he comes so close to screaming in pain that you can practically hear it in the air between you. Your stupid, fragile heart goes out to him – he’s being such an idiot, but you love him, and that’s why it hurts.

You love him, and that’s why you stay outside when the two of you do eventually get to Frisk’s and they agree to try – because you see their expression and you know he won’t want you to be there.

 

“He didn’t give it time to heal, did he?” Frisk asks that night, a mug of something unidentifiable – but strong, going by the smell – in their hands. You have tea.

“No. He waited about a day, but that was because he was unconscious.”

“Well, I guess that explains it,” they say, slumping back on the bench. There’s a small vegetable patch in front of you, not that anything’s really growing at this time of year, and a scattering of snowdrops before the trees close back in – maybe two metres from you. Their house has changed since you were last here. They’ve changed: they’ve shot up in height, and they could barely speak for the first few hours. They’re still a little croaky now. “It’s probably not going to get better.”

“I thought so.”

“You don’t sound that upset about it.”

Shrugging, you take a sip of rapidly-cooling tea. The blanket over your shoulders threatens to slip off and you have to pull it back into place. “I don’t think I am. I just worry about him. You saw how he reacted: I don’t think he’s going to take this well, but he won’t speak to me about it. At all.”

They nod. “You’re going to have to make him, then.”

You eschew laughter and decide to be honest instead. “I can’t.”

“Try.”

“I _can’t_.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that difficult. You know the situation better than I do and you know him better than I do, and _I_ could do it if I wanted to. But I won’t, because I’m pretty clearly not the right person to do it.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried.”

The moon is very bright above the trees; it’s a clear night, and you wouldn’t be surprised to see snow in the morning, given how cold it is now. Wouldn’t that be nice? You could be taken back to the frozen lake and remember how things were then, before any of this happened.

They sigh in a pointed way, and you’re fairly sure they’re looking at you. They might even be lifting an eyebrow – you wouldn’t put it past them. “Alright, since you’re very sure, I’ll give you a hint. Just don’t say ‘I can’t do it’ unless you really mean it. You know why he won’t talk about it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know more than me. And you know what he’s doing, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why can’t you just tell him that? He knows too, I’m sure, and all you really need to do is put it into words. It’ll flow easily from there, or it’ll at least flow.”

The tea is cold now, which was to be expected, really. You put the mug down and put your head into your hands. “I can’t do that,” you say miserably. “I really have tried, but every time I bring it up, he waves it all away, and then I feel too relieved to try it again. I _can’t do it_.”

“Then try harder.” There’s the sound of shuffling, and their hand rests on your shoulder. “I’ll give you another hint, but really, stop acting like you can’t do it. It’s not that difficult, it’s just that both of you are _making_ it difficult. You’re both so far out of your comfort zones with this that you don’t know how to do things that are, for all extents and purposes, very easy. So how about this: try and tell him how this is making you feel. Be selfish, if you want to think about it like that. Tell him it’s unfair on you, because it is.”

More than they know, or more than they let on they know. You swallow and stare at the ground, though you can’t see much now you’re blocking out the moonlight.

“Can you do that?”

“No,” you say pettishly, and they laugh.

 

The next morning, he wakes you up early, but you don’t think he meant to. He should know you’re a light sleeper, too; the few creaks and bangs he makes are enough to wake you. Maybe that’s the quietest he can be now – clumsiness hasn’t yet left him, and won’t for some time.

You wait a minute or two – enough for him to leave the cottage after, presumably, picking up the stick Frisk whittled down for him the night before – and then you get up. It’s not without regret. The morning is bitterly cold, even inside, and you don’t want to leave the pile of furs and blankets that you slept in. Sacrifices will have to be made, you suppose. You shrug on a sweater, a cloak, and pull an extra fur over your shoulders for good measure before struggling with your boots, running fingers through your fringe, and going out to find him.

The sun is milky, but it’s there; the forest feels washed out with mist and thin coverings of snow around the tree roots. His footsteps are marked as clearly as if he’d left arrows for you, and you crunch your way along the forest path slowly, breathing out in white clouds.

You catch him up at the very edge of the forest, just before it turns into fields. Like a snow-covered tree trunk, he’s standing there, staring out onto the sea of empty land and the hedgerows that scarify it.

“Morning,” you say, so as not to spook him.

“Morning.”

It’s warmer when he puts his arm around you – the one not currently holding the cane that’s propping him up. It’d be warmer still if he looked at you, but he doesn’t: he starts to walk again, and what can you do but follow?

It takes you a few minutes of walking down the country lane before you work up the nerve to speak. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” he asks, walking with uneven thuds of the cane. He won’t lean on you, though his arm is still around your shoulders.

“That wasn’t a very helpful thing to say.”

“I meant it, Chara. Talk about what? This? There’s nothing to talk about. It’s ruined, and it’s not going to get better.”

“Well, it might. We had to go to a lot of different witches before my eyes were fixed, didn’t we? We could just do the rounds again.”

“It’ll take a long time, with this _thing_.” You don’t like how he says ‘thing’, like he’s spitting the word out before he has to taste it. “We won’t be able to go and see Undyne, that’s for sure. I won’t be able to scramble up that mountain face anymore.”

Wind whisks past you, and you huddle into your blanket. Your cheeks are so cold that you can’t feel them anymore, but it’s not an unfamiliar sensation.

He sighs. “I carried you on my back last time. I got up there with both packs and you, no trouble at all.”

“I think there was some trouble,” you reason.

“But I could _do it_.” He sounds as if he’s about to say something else, but then he closes his mouth and walks on with a vengeance, slamming the cane into the packed-dirt lane and its frost-covered potholes. You have to jog to keep up with him now, but you can see his face twisted into a tight grimace of pain at the pace.

“Stop,” you say, sounding unconvinced even to your ears.

There’s nothing that could stop him now: he frowns ahead of him as if filled with determination, filled with the certainty that if he can just get to the end of the lane, he’ll have proven himself. What is there to prove? Why does he have to prove anything? He’s still him: his leg hasn’t changed anything fundamental, so why is he so angry?

You know why. You just don’t want to say it.

“Stop,” you say again, a little louder.

Nothing.

“Stop!”

Nothing – or no, there is a response, but it’s only an increase in speed.

“Stop, Asriel, just stop for a second!”

He doesn’t even look at you, so you dig your heels in and stop walking, hugging the blanket around you and glaring up at him. Finally, he slows down and turns to you, but there’s nothing kind or welcoming in his expression. You hadn’t hoped there would be.

“Just _stop_ ,” you say, firmer this time. “Stop walking, stop running away, for fuck’s sake, and talk to me! Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing? I’ve been doing it for years: I know you’re just trying to escape it all, like walking on and on and on is going to change anything, and okay, maybe it will, but you’re going about it all wrong! It’s not going to fix this! I’ve accepted that I can’t run away forever, so can’t you trust me to understand what you’re feeling?”

You take a breath, resisting the urge to bite your lip and shut up. “I know what this is about! I know you feel mortified, I know you feel humiliated because you think you can’t take care of me like you always have, so just _talk_ to me about it! Stop…” The words don’t come out easily, and you try again. “Stop treating me like luggage!”

Is that really how you feel? It must be – or it should be, if you felt the way you should instead of this desperate, shameful habit you haven’t yet got rid of, the one that makes you scoop up every piece of attention he gives you, and treasure it. But being like that won’t be helpful now. You need to be reasonable about this, and stop making things difficult by not confronting him.

It’s harder than you wanted it to be.

He’s looking down at you, golden eyes wide, but quickly his expression changes: he bites his lip, his eyebrows furrow down, and he looks like he’s about to cry. “You didn’t have to put it like that…” he says, and – sure enough – there’s something choked about his voice.

You’re in front of him in a second, your hands on his chest, as gentle as you can be.

“How else was I supposed to put it?” you ask, all the ferocity gone. _But be reasonable, be reasonable_. “That’s what you’re doing! I know you won’t show me how much it hurts, or admit that you might need help doing some things until you get used to it, and I know that you’re hiding it all from me because you think you can’t look after me anymore. That’s what this is! Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but don’t just…!” He’s worrying his lip again, breathing shallowly and looking up at the cloudy sky, but his free hand comes to rest on yours. “Don’t just _say_ it…”

“It’s the truth, and it’s hurting both of us, so I’m going to say it.” At great emotional expense, perhaps, but you’re still going to say it. You’re getting to him: you can feel it. You can see it.

“I know it’s unfair on you, and…”

“Yes! It’s unfair on me! It’s unfair on you too, so you need to _stop_. Let it out, accept it, and stop acting like this is the end.”

His breath comes out in irregular white clouds, just above your head.

In a gentler voice, you say, “Maybe it can be fixed. We can try. But maybe it can’t, and you need to accept that: you can’t live your life like this.”

“I can try.”

“You can’t. It’s not fair.”

You’ve said what you wanted to say: it feels like you’ve become unsalvageable, irredeemable in the extreme for criticising him. There’s nothing you can do but rest your forehead against his chest and almost cry in relief when he moves his arm so it’s around your shoulders. It’s okay, then. Even if these days – these choices, these forks in your path – eat into you until you feel you’ve nothing left of yourself, it’s okay if you’re together. You just have to hope that he believes that too.

“Where did you learn to confront people like this?” he asks eventually, his voice thick despite the smile he seems to be trying for.

“You taught me.”

“Shame on me.”

“No, it’s good. You’ve taught me so much.”

There’s a loud sniff, completely undignified, and his breath comes out shakily. In a small voice, he says, “That may be, but I don’t know what to do now.”

“You don’t have to do anything special.”

“I don’t want to accept this.”

“I know.”

“I don’t, I don’t, I… I can’t stop thinking of all the things I’m never going to be able to do again.”

“It’s not as bad as you think. You’ve only lost the use of one leg. You’ll learn ways to get around it.”

“Like you learnt to be blind?”

“Like that. I wouldn’t have been able to do it alone, though. Regardless of the suicide part, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.”

An unspoken offer, and it’s up to him if he takes it or not.

Your eyes are shut now, and you feel sensitive to every sound he makes, every touch of his. It’s a kind of harmless nostalgia, when you remember what it was like to know him only by these senses, and feel him reaching for you whenever you reached out in turn. So you keep your eyes shut tightly, and you don’t let on that you know he’s crying, though it’s obvious from the irregularity of his breathing, from the small whines and faint growls as he sucks in air.

“I don’t…I can’t, I…” he says eloquently. “I don’t want to think about it! I don’t want anyone to see me! Having you see me like this every day hurts so much, and then I…I start thinking about…if my parents saw me like this, and I…”

You wrap your arms around him, stroking his back as he cries; his head sinks until his forehead is resting on your hair.

“I can’t let them know,” he sobs unevenly. “I can’t…I can’t let them see: they’d just worry, and…and comfort me, and I’d…I’d rather die…”

Your fingers reach up to his neck, stroking the fur there like you know he likes. If you can do nothing else, you can at least do that: you can at least show him that you know him better than anyone else, and you can take care of him too, in your own way.

Thinking on it, you’re almost certain he’d push you away if you phrased it like that.

Well, what can you do, then? That’s what needs to be done, but you know he won’t let himself accept it from you.

‘ _Be selfish’_ , Frisk had said – can’t you try that? Can’t you ignore the bitter taste it leaves, and try something new, if that’s what it takes to get to him?

So you say, “Don’t be ashamed in front of me. Don’t hide yourself from me. I’m not going to pity you or look down on you, so don’t even try it. I can’t do anything about your parents, but I can tell you right now that while I love your strength, while I love your body, that is not the only thing you are to me: you’re not just something to lean on. You’ve taught me so much, and you should know by now that if I chose to live for you at the start, it wasn’t just because you were strong enough to carry me when I was tired.”

A sound quite unlike any word you’ve ever heard comes from him, and he shakes his head as if burying it further into your hair. You’ll need to wash it later, with how much he’s crying. His shoulder blades are trembling under your arms.

“It’s okay,” you say in a soft voice. “We’re going to work on it together, and that’ll make it okay. It’s always been like that, hasn’t it? It doesn’t matter where we are or what we’re doing: anything can be a home with you. Anything can be our normality, if I’m with you. So it’s really okay. Okay?”

“ _No_ ,” he says, and it’s so childish and reminds you so much of you last night that you laugh. You move backwards and gently take his face in your hands, lifting it so you can look at each other. As if embarrassed to be seen, he turns his face away and nuzzles into your hand, closing his eyes. He does look a mess, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. He cries at so much: he cried when you cut your shoulder open by mistake a few months ago, he cried when you admitted for the first time that – should the opportunity arise – you’d probably marry him, he cries whenever hunting goes badly and you don’t get a clean kill, and you’ve definitely seen him cry at the sunset a few times. It’s refreshingly normal, and you smile.

“It’s going to be okay,” you repeat, pushing the point in, but he only whines childishly again and pushes his cheek into your hand, moving his head so he can kiss your palm. It’s a way of telling you that he’s fine, just unwilling to say anything, and you smile again. Your knuckles flush bright red against his fur.

It’s too cold like this, even with the warmth of satisfaction.

“Come on, look at me,” you coax, gently pulling your hand away from him so he has to turn his head. “Promise me you’re going to stop hiding this, alright? Promise me you’ll talk to me. I don’t want you to only be comfortable with being relied on: that isn’t how this works.”

“I know.” The very image of a scolded child, which isn’t quite what you were going for.

“Be more cheerful about it.”

“No.”

“Then reassure me that you’re only like that because you’re embarrassed, and not because you’re unwilling.”

Screwing his eyes up again, he tries to look away but your hands keep his face in place. He groans wearily. “Of course I’m embarrassed! This is humiliating, Chara!”

“Oh, shush. It’s just me.” You stand on your tiptoes, kissing him on the nose, and only move far back enough to let your noses touch. “You’re allowed to be weak in front of me, aren’t you?”

Another whine, but instead of trying to look away this time, he just tilts his head slightly to kiss you. It’s been a while since he’s kissed you, or at least since he’s kissed you like this. You wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him down, and keep your eyes closed.

This is what victory tastes like.

He clings to you with one arm as well as he ever did with two; he kisses you as if determined to lose himself in you completely. And you’ll let him, if that’s what he wants. If he must hide, better he hide within you than from you. You run your fingers lightly over the back of his neck and you like the way he shivers into you, pushing your chests together.

It might take some time, but you’re not going to let him get out of this one the easy way. The sacrifice is made, the blood dried and flaked away, and there are only consequences now – you won’t let him shirk them, not if that means pushing you away.

Is that selfishness? If it is, then you’ll be selfish. Yes, you think as you bite his bottom lip and feel his breath on your skin, you’ll be selfish, and gladly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really will try to leave this story now, so thank you for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> There is now an epilogue which can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6594151). It's not got much plot, but that's all explained in that description


End file.
